


The Only Living Boy in New York

by neverfaraway



Series: String Theory [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Coming Out, Communication Failure, Developing Relationship, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak Needs A Hug, Eddie Kaspbrak is a Mess, M/M, Phone Sex, Richie Tozier is a Mess, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-02-22 23:53:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23635690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfaraway/pseuds/neverfaraway
Summary: Despite his best intentions, Eddie finds himself back on the East Coast.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: String Theory [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1701523
Comments: 18
Kudos: 89





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a hot minute. If lockdown has any tangible benefits, it's that I finally got this story finished - I love these stupid Losers, but they've been living in my head for entirely too long. So with this, it's so long, Reddie, and ~~no~~ thanks for all the heartbreak x
> 
> Find the updated playlist for this series here: [Shake the Disease – a Reddie playlist](https://play.spotify.com/user/neverfaraway/playlist/3Nkhaya9IGo2VE5NAWRvRC)

“Home, sweet home,” Richie announces, his voice rough with fatigue. It’s been thirteen hours since he and Eddie left Derry. He pushes open the front door and hooks an arm around it to turn on the lights, ushering Eddie inside without ever once managing to lay a hand on him. It’s just as well. Eddie’s keyed up so high he feels like a single touch from Richie will set off a chain reaction in his nervous system and he’ll explode, one synapse at a time. 

Richie’s condo is… well, it’s everything Eddie expected, with its comic book posters and sad collection of sci-fi DVDs and vinyl records on a set of Billy bookcases that look like they’re a sharp breeze away from collapse. It's everything Eddie expected, and nothing like he expected at all, because it feels lived in, in a way Eddie hadn’t quite anticipated. He’d thought that between touring and neglect, Richie’s apartment would feel stale with his absence. But there are touches, everywhere, that speak to this being Richie’s home, in a tangible, comfortable way that Eddie’s never managed to achieve in any of the places he’s lived. There’s a little collection of succulents on a windowsill and a stack of well-thumbed paperbacks on the coffee table, like Richie keeps his favourite books close by, or maybe has a long list of titles he’s intending to re-read. In Eddie’s townhouse in New York there’s a single tidy row of John Grisham novels lined up carefully in the guest bedroom. He can’t remember the last time he read a book for the sheer pleasure of reading it. There’s a collection of motivational self-help tomes with aggressive titles on the shelf in his home office. He read them all, once, in the hope that cultivating 7 Habits would make him a Highly Effective Person. By comparison, Richie’s space feels like that of a well-rounded, normal person, and Eddie hangs in the middle of it all feeling like a cardboard cut-out of a human being.

“Mi Bat Cave es su place to crash,” Richie says, toeing off his sneakers and dropping his bag on the floor. “I need coffee, want one?”

“It’s the middle of the goddamn night; no, I don’t want any freaking coffee. Are you even intending to sleep?”

Richie sighs dramatically and turns to face him, his expression warm and soft in a way Eddie had also somehow failed to anticipate. His glasses are smudged and cracked and his shirt’s a mess of creases, but Eddie is struck for what feels like the thousandth time by the realisation that he thinks Richie might be the most beautiful person he’s ever known. It’s not about the receding hairline - Richie is touchy about it, Eddie's only mentioned it, teasingly, the once - and the permanent five-o’clock shadow; it’s the way his eyes go soft when he thinks Eddie won’t notice, and his mouth curls into a gentle smile he never bestows upon anybody else, so that Eddie can see the goodness shining right out of him. Beneath all the bluster and the dick jokes, Richie is his favourite person in the whole world and is constantly presenting Eddie with the unspoken evidence that the feeling is entirely, categorically mutual. In the 90s, a short-term roommate had regularly dropped E, and one night he’d come home and told Eddie, who had sat through the whole sloppy tirade wearing an expression of disgust and envy and terror, that it was like being completely, one-hundred-percent certain that you were in the place you were always meant to be; that the rightness of it, the joy of it, spilled through every part of your body like warm, golden light. The memory of that conversation keeps coming back to him, when Richie pins him with that private, slow, happy smile. 

The thing is, Richie is about to kiss him; Eddie knows this, he's been itching for it since they got on the plane, but something about being in this lived-in, comfortable space is throwing him off. Something about the evidence of Richie’s existence here, a 41-year-old man with a life and a job and responsibilities, for all intents and purposes a stranger, has set his nerves on edge and makes him wish for the empty security of his aspirator.

So Eddie flinches, just barely. He doesn’t mean to; his heart was already thumping at the thought of Richie’s hands on him again after thirteen hours of fitting themselves back into the mould of friends-and-nothing-more, but he knows Richie notices because his hands freeze in mid-air.

“I guess it is late,” Richie says blankly. He reaches into his pocket for his phone, turning away. “I’ll order food.”

Eddie wishes he had the courage to reach for him, tug him back into their shared space and demand his attention. All the bravery he summoned in checking himself out of the hospital and knocking on Richie’s hotel room door seems to have dripped out of him, bit by bit, in the thirteen hours since they left that room for the last time. 

Eddie remembers, vividly, the fight in the Clubhouse. The time Richie had crept his hand up the outside of Eddie’s knee and then grasped his hand, entwining their fingers, which were sticky with the drips of the Rocket they’d shared on the way to the Barrens. Silence had descended - which was ridiculous, because they hadn’t even been talking; in the absence of the rest of the Losers, they’d been tucked in the hammock reading in a comfortable, heavy quiet, Eddie’s favourite kind of time spent down in the Clubhouse - and Eddie had realised he wasn’t capable of breathing, entranced by the feel of Richie’s hot palm against his own, by the intimate tangle of their fingers and the jumble of their legs, stacked one between the other, which suddenly seemed so suggestive. He’d realised it was turning him on at the same time he realised sitting with Richie like this always held him on the verge of a background level of arousal. It brought to mind the warnings his ma had muttered about men who did things they oughtn’t to.

Remembering the way Richie’s face had fallen in on itself when he launched himself to his feet and wiped his hand on the leg of his shorts makes him doubly-determined to retract this most recent, clumsy rejection, but Richie is already on his phone, ordering what sounds like an unnecessary amount of food. Eddie thinks he might not be hungry anymore. 

“There’s a guest room,” Richie says, when he hangs up, gesturing at Eddie’s cases and failing to meet Eddie’s eye.

“You want me in the guest room?”

“No, Eddie, I don’t want you in the fucking guest room,” Richie replies slowly, and Eddie thinks this might be one of the few times he’s actually managed to piss Richie off. He suddenly, abruptly, hates the unfamiliarity of this interaction; he finds himself thinking guiltily that with Myra there wasn’t anything to negotiate, anymore, because their years of picking their way around one another’s peculiarities were long behind them. 

“Right,” he says, picking up the nearest of the cases, because he doesn’t have any desire to articulate his feelings on the matter. “Great. _Fuck you, too,_ ” he adds, under his breath, as he drags the heavy bag in the direction of the bedroom, knowing Richie doesn’t deserve it, knowing he mainly means it for himself. 

He shoves the case into the corner of the room, weirded out by the fact that Richie’s bedroom furniture consists, in its entirety, of a huge bed, a fitted closet, and a table with a lamp on it. Unlike the living room, it’s a Spartan, sad sort of space, like a dorm room, if the student in question were broke and depressed. He’s debating the merit of taking out some of his shirts and hanging them in Richie’s closet, so that he has something to wear that isn’t creased and stale from being thrown hastily into a case a week ago in Manhattan, but he realises he doesn’t know how many shirts he’ll need, because they haven’t talked about how long he’s staying. 

The only sign of this bare, anonymous room belonging to Richie is a framed print above the beside table. Eddie leans in to look at it, realises it isn’t a print, but a poster, Richie’s face in black-and-white, badly photocopied. He must have been in his twenties; his hair’s a disaster and his glasses are huge, but he looks _confident_ in a way that makes Eddie’s mouth go dry. He looks like the world owes him a living and he’s come to make good on it. Eddie leans closer to decipher the scrawl of black biro on what looks like a crumpled napkin that’s been straightened out and tucked inside the picture frame. _Congrats on not being a cunt - Bill Hicks._

What Eddie knows about comedy can be written on the back of an extremely small postcard, but he knows this is a big deal. The autograph must pre-date the poster by a number of years; Eddie imagines Richie, fresh out of high school, shoving the only thing he had to hand in the direction of his idol and hoarding it here ever since. 

When he returns to the kitchen, Richie is frowning at the contents of his fridge like they personally offend him. “I can’t even pretend I've got food in here,” he says. “Got beer, if you want it?"

Eddie nods, even though he hasn’t imbibed this much alcohol in years and it’s going to require the mother of juice cleanses to rectify the state of his liver. He accepts the bottle Richie uncaps and passes over. “Nice poster,” he says, with a nod in the direction of the bedroom. “Hicks, huh?"

Richie grimaces. “Skipped school senior year to see him. It’s supposed to be a reminder, or some shit.”

Eddie waits, but Richie doesn’t elaborate. Instead, he takes a long pull of his beer and grimaces at the floor. It takes a moment for Eddie to parse the expression on his face, but when he does it makes him sick with recognition. 

“What, and you somehow didn’t pass the test? Are you fucking kidding me?” He says, when Richie resolutely avoids his eyes. “You fuckin’ made it, Rich. You’re everything you wanted to be when we were fifteen.”

Richie glances at him with a smile threatening to curl around the edges of his downturned mouth. “Guess you’re not wrong in some respects.”

Eddie has always hated the kind of literature that speaks of people’s hearts melting, but it’s what his does, a little, at the sly, conciliatory look on Richie’s face. It’s familiar and yearned for and something he can’t believe he ever really forgot. 

“You do realise that when I said you’d had a shitty life I was hopped up on morphine and really fucking pissed at you? I’m fuckin’ proud of you, man,” Eddie says, too earnestly, his voice rough and too warm. Richie blinks at him owlishly. This time Eddie doesn’t shy away; he reaches over, takes the bottle out of Richie’s hands and sets it on the counter behind him. “I’m gonna kiss you now; sorry about before. Being here, it's…”

“Yeah. Far out, right?” Richie lets him step closer, lets Eddie manoeuvre him until his back is against the countertop. 

“Pretty far out,” Eddie agrees.

He kisses Richie the way he’d wanted to on the airplane, when Richie had been showing him the photo Mike had WhatsApped of the sign reading ‘ _You are now leaving Maine. Worth a visit; worth a lifetime._ ’ Richie had been muttering foul-mouthedly in his ear - “How’s this for a fucking lifetime, you assholes.” - and viciously annotating the picture, drawing a gigantic cock and balls, adding a cartoonish spurt of jizz, while Eddie snorted helplessly and jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow as a flight attendant raised an eyebrow at them on her way down the aisle. 

“You’re such a fucking child,” he’d hissed, feeling like he might die from laughing, unable to articulate why Richie drawing a dick on a photograph should be so unfairly hilarious.

Richie had grinned at him, eyes dancing, so pleased with himself that he’d slipped a hand onto Eddie’s thigh and kept it there, beneath Eddie’s bunched up hoodie, for the next three and a half hours. Eddie had wanted to kiss him, then, so much that he’d had to pretend to read the in-flight magazine to prevent himself from doing something ridiculous, like telling Richie to meet him in the bathroom so that Eddie could blow his mind at thirty-thousand feet, an idea he would never, ever have thought he’d find so arousing, but now he’d thought about it he just couldn’t stop.

Pressed against the kitchen counter, Richie moans into his mouth and Eddie chases after it with his tongue. He feels like a teenager again; not that he ever experienced this as a teenager. It’s what he imagines he’d have felt if he’d ever had the balls to press someone - who is he kidding? To press Richie - up against a kitchen counter and fit their mouths together just so. 

There’s a knock at the door and Richie disentangles himself, cursing under his breath. “Hold that thought,” he says as he disappears, returning moments later with a bag that immediately fills the room with the most delicious smell Eddie has ever encountered. His stomach gives a thunderous growl, prompting Richie to laugh, nudging him out of the way of the cutlery drawer as he passes.

“Guess it’s up to you to decide what you want to put in your mouth first.”

The ease with which they joke about it - have been joking about this, for the past two-and-a-half days - still makes his pulse jump. “Gross. Just give me my damn noodles before I decide to eat you instead.”

Richie cracks up, doubled over the chopsticks he’s fished out of the takeout bag, and Eddie flushes, thrilled. 

They fall onto the couch to eat. Eddie glances at Richie out of the corner of his eye and recognises the expression on his face easily, because it’s one he spent most of his teenage years watching without recognition; he realises now it’s the look Richie perpetually papers over the cracks when his happiness is wearing thin. He’d worn it when he told Eddie the Toziers were leaving town, and he’d worn it when Eddie had called him an asshole that night on Mike’s barn roof and pushed him away to cycle home on his own, furious, hot tears dripping off the end of his nose. On the surface there’s still the curl of Richie’s laughter, the smile that hasn’t quite faded since Eddie pinned him to the bed in that awful hotel room, but beneath it there’s uncertainty. Eddie sympathises; he shares Richie’s fear of what comes next. 

He wants to reach over and smooth it away; can picture his hands accomplishing it, even as he sits resolutely digging through his lo mein - really, he thinks desperately, Chinese? Fucking hell, Rich, there’d better not be any fortune cookies hidden in that bag. The apartment is still unnerving him, the reality of having made the decision to return to California rather than New York is beginning to set in, and Eddie wants to scream at Richie: “How long did it take til you worked out who you were? How long did you spend figuring it out? Who the fuck am I?” But it’s been a long fucking week, and he’s hungry and he’s exhausted.

“Fuck this,” he says, setting his half-drunk beer on the coffee table, daring Richie to admonish him about his meds. “You got any real booze?"

-

The next morning, Eddie wakes to the indistinct sound of cursing and the thrum of They Might Be Giants bleeding through the closed bedroom door. He lifts his head incrementally. Last night, Richie had offered him whiskey and Eddie had accepted it gratefully, ignoring the voice that warned him about the dangers of mixing alcohol and opioids, desperate for anything to dull his sharp awareness of the spectre of Richie’s fear. It had tasted like paint-thinner but he’d let Richie ply him with it, thankful for the way it helped him melt into the faux-leather of Richie’s depressing bachelor couch. He’d only regretted it when the ache in his arm started to coalesce into a more insistent discomfort, and he’d prodded Richie’s thigh where it lay next to him, mumbling about his meds. Richie had looked at him blearily and ushered him off to bed, gathering pills and water on the way, pouring Eddie into sheets that, thankfully, smelled freshly laundered. He’d missed Richie making the bed, wondered aloud whether Richie had someone to do his laundry for him, then must have fallen asleep before Richie could answer.

There’s the sound of low-key destruction taking place on the other side of the bedroom door, beneath the music, but Eddie takes a moment before getting up to investigate. He takes a look around to confirm this is Richie’s bedroom. Richie’s bedroom, with Richie’s bedsheets and Richie’s gig poster on the wall. He remembers waking in the night to Richie snoring next to him, fully clothed on top of the blankets with his face mashed into the pillow, but he'd sunk back into the painkiller haze without reaching out to touch him the way he wanted to.

He shuffles to the bedroom door and opens it far enough to observe Richie, freshly shaved and managing to look more put-together than Eddie has seen him all week, shuffling through the paperbacks on the coffee table, muttering to himself as he sorts them into two separate piles. He seems absorbed by it and Eddie feels briefly guilty, as though there is something illicit about him lurking in the doorway, stealing this opportunity to observe Richie without his permission. He aches, watching Richie potter about this space of his, surprised to recognise it as envy; Richie is humming along to his music, inhabiting this apartment and this city, with an ease that Eddie thinks he has probably never possessed in his life.

He clears his throat and is treated to the sight of Richie clutching at his chest in faux-surprise while his face splits into a smile so broad it’s a little like looking into the sun. The corner of Eddie’s mouth curves upwards in reply. 

“Morning, sleeping beauty,” Richie says. His eyes are crinkled at the corners, but it’s a Voice, an unidentifiable Southern drawl. Eddie flips him the bird. 

Richie cackles and clambers to his feet, making the middle-aged noises Eddie takes daily glucosamine supplements to avoid. “You want breakfast? There’s bread in the icebox.” 

While saying this, Richie has picked up a burned piece of toast from a plate abandoned on the counter and shoved it into his mouth, talking around it in a way that evinces in Eddie a complex combination of nostalgia, affection and disgust. 

“Does your toaster have any setting besides ‘cremation’?”

Richie shrugs. “Sorry, dude, it’s burnt toast or no toast. I’ll pick other stuff up on the way home.”

Eddie wonders for a second where they’re going, how Richie is planning for them to spend their day. He hopes it isn’t anything too touristy, because he’s had ample experience of sight-seers in New York, doesn’t feel up to the noise and the overcrowding. He’d kind of hoped they’d be spending the day in the apartment, anticipating it as much as terrified by the prospect of an entire twenty-four hours with only Richie for company. He has things to put right, that barricade behind Richie’s expression to dismantle, if he can only summon the courage.

Then he sees Richie’s keys on the counter, realises Richie’s wearing his sneakers, has a jacket - similar to the remains of the one destroyed by the hospital in Bangor, but a darker brown - on the back of a chair.

Richie grimaces, following Eddie’s gaze. He looks both guilty and relieved. “Meeting with my agent. Tour to cancel, dates on which to renege.”

“Can you do that?” Eddie asks, frowning. “I mean, can you afford it? Who’s liable?”

Richie shrugs again. “That’s what I need to find out.”

Eddie means to say, _don’t cancel on my account_ , or words to that effect, but it would sound presumptuous; it’s not like fighting off an eldritch horror doesn’t qualify Richie for a break, it isn’t necessarily all about him. He’s still in the process of locating the appropriate sentiments when Richie comes to stand in front of him, toast crumbs at the corners of his mouth. 

“I’ll be an hour or two - three, max.” Richie promises. He hovers in front of Eddie for a second and Eddie resists the urge to lean in and lick the crumbs away. The fact that he wants to is so alien it makes him put a hand on the counter behind him to steady himself.

It would be so easy, he thinks, to fold himself into the spaces in Richie’s life. Build his own stack of paperbacks, link all his electronics up to the wireless speakers so he can blast his own music while he moves around their shared home. He could move out here tomorrow; it’d be tricky, but he could manage it. He’s owed about a month of leave, having spent four years avoiding time at home without really noticing he was doing it. He could resign with good references, blame the relocation. He’s got skills and experience that companies would value, and savings to live off until a new job comes through. He could think about setting up that driving business he’s been idly considering; he can imagine Richie’s glee if he said he needed Richie to take care of things for a couple of months while he got things off the ground, can already hear the pleasure with which Richie would tease him about being a kept man. 

Eddie’s spinning through all this in the seconds between Richie leaving the room and returning, watching the pattern of the next fews months, years, even, unspool before him like a movie of somebody else’s life. He never used to think about the future much at all, when he could help it, and suddenly it’s like someone’s taken a sledgehammer to the walls that have been holding back his imagination, and now his brain’s expanding exponentially, like the Blob - no, like an h-bomb blast, light and heat pouring out of him in all directions -

“You alright, man?” Richie asks around the piece of toast still clamped between his teeth. He’s tugging on his jacket and pocketing the keys. “You know I can stay, if you want. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than telling Brandon to shove his meeting up his ass. The nail in the coffin of a stellar period of my career."

“Who’s supposed to keep me in shitty whiskey then, dickwad? Get out,” Eddie says. 

Richie presses a hand to his heart as though overcome with emotion. Eddie flips him the bird for the second time. When Richie closes the front door behind him, he’s smiling, his eyes creased at the corners and bright in a way Eddie hadn’t realised he’d been missing.

Eddie takes a deep breath and counts it out, five-to-one, looking helplessly at the two piles of books, abandoned on the couch. Eddie doesn’t know what books he’d stack by the coffee table if he rang the office today and told them he was never coming back; he has no idea what music he’d play through Richie’s bluetooth speakers, other than the music they’d shared back in the day, shit from college radio and the mixtapes Richie used to leave lying around the Clubhouse. Myra doesn’t like music, with the exception of the Carpenters. She thinks David Bowie is dangerously avant garde and, on the one occasion he’d got her tickets to one of those 90s reunion shows for her birthday, thinking it was something she and her friends from work might enjoy, she’d been utterly bemused. He’d returned the tickets and bought her an expensive coffee machine she’d circled in a magazine, and she’d kissed him on the cheek and called Cheryl to tell her how well it went with all the other appliances in their brand new kitchen.

If Eddie thinks too hard about his life in New York, he starts to feel the disparate pieces of himself slip further out of sync with one another. It’s as though he floats above himself, sitting in his underwear at Richie’s crumb-strewn kitchen counter, and watches the kaleidoscope images of himself shift and coalesce, only to lose focus and watch himself float away, with no idea which of the two versions of himself is left, to be squashed back into this injured, weary body. He’s familiar with anxiety brought on by a hangover; coffee will only make things worse, so he fetches himself a glass of water and drains it in long, slow gulps, willing his heart to cease its sickly lurching behind his ribs.


	2. Chapter 2

At the Town House, with Richie’s hand in his hair and their mostly naked skin so close he’d have rather they climbed inside one another than have to peel themselves apart, Eddie had made a decision that seemed - to him, at least - pretty logical. It had quieted the fluttering feeling in his chest when he thought about Myra and his job and the distance between New York and California. He'd felt like his heart was ready to burst out of his chest the second Richie put a hand on him in something more than friendship, and it would be easy to tell himself that this was it, the thing he hadn’t realised he was missing. He loved Richie well enough, it wasn’t wrong to tell him so, but he needed to be absolutely certain that he wanted him - wanted _this_ \- with a greater form of permanence, before he severed all ties to his life in New York. That was just a basic algorithm; the analysis of risk. All this had spooled through Eddie’s brain in the long, drowsy moments while they dozed on Richie's spare bed with the early afternoon sun hot on their skin through the open window.

“You smell like hospitals,” Richie had murmured, sounding like he found it upsetting.

Eddie had made a face at himself, revolted by the thought of exactly how long it had been since he showered, vaguely surprised that, in his haste to get to Richie and say anything, do anything, to salvage things between them, it hadn’t occurred to him sooner. “I can’t use my fucking shower,” he said, then, with dawning horror. “Jesus Christ, Richie, it’s probably still covered in my _own blood_.”

“Hey,” Richie said, sounding unreasonably warm and soft, like now that he had permission all his feelings for Eddie were leaking out of him without him meaning them too. It made Eddie’s stomach do somersaults, but he couldn’t have said then whether it was with affection or alarm. “You’re not the only one with a bathroom, dummy. Although Bill lucked out, there; his is palatial.”

“You’ve been in Bill’s bathroom?” Eddie said, because he needed a distraction from the way joy was trying to claw its way out of his chest like an existential xenomorph. 

“Don’t be jealous, babe. I only let Bill sex me up in his walk-in shower the one time in your absence.”

“Call me ‘babe’ again and I’ll gut you.”

Richie’s expression was one Eddie hadn’t ever previously witnessed. It was a sort of blissed-out bewilderment, like he’d won the lottery but he couldn’t remember buying a ticket. Eddie wondered whether the strange thing was that he’d never seen Richie tender, because that was the only word to describe the look that was being sent his way right then.

“I need a shower,” Eddie muttered, ducking out of Richie’s embrace. He thought about Richie’s creased and bearded face, smushed into the blankets on his hospital bed, and it made him pause in the bathroom doorway. “I’m not saying I want you to join me in here. But if you wanted to, that’d be ok.”

He ducked away before Richie could answer and busied himself with inspecting Richie’s toiletries. They were uninspiring - anti-dandruff shampoo, some kind of generically masculine body wash that made Eddie’s skin itch in sympathy, a tube of Nivea Men moisturiser - and yet, they were somehow endearing. Standing in a hotel bathroom perusing Richie’s laughable approximation of skincare was making Eddie’s mouth want to curl into a tiny smile. He swallowed down panic and avoided his own eyes in the mirror as he reached behind the shower curtain to turn on the water.

“Fuck! Motherfucking shitting fuck - "

“Eddie?” Richie called. He appeared at the bathroom door with wide eyes, alert to danger. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Eddie snapped. Richie was still wearing nothing but his boxers, the skin above them mottled with bruises the colour of eggplants. “I forgot about my fucking cast.”

The last time he’d had a broken arm, it had presaged six miserable weeks of utter, degrading helplessness. His mother, her face beatific, helping him in and out of the bathroom. The thought of going through it again, of negotiating clothing and washing himself with the help of another human being, made him want to howl. Every inch of his skin felt filthy and slick.

Eddie was going to have to get used to the idea that this situation, he and Richie mostly naked in a hotel bathroom, had blown a crucial circuit somewhere in Richie’s brain, because the expression on his face had shifted into embarrassed desire. “Don’t sweat eet, señor,” he said, with a grin. “I’ve got just the thing.”

He disappeared and Eddie heard the sounds of him shuffling about in the bedroom. He breathed through his nose and counted slowly down from five.

Richie reappeared in the doorway brandishing something triumphantly in his left hand.

“Is that the bag from the trash can?” Eddie demanded, and Richie grinned at him, waving it in his face. “Don’t even fucking think about it -“

“It’s clean! Jesus Christ, if I’d known you’d still be such a pissy little bitch I wouldn’t have bothered letting you seduce me.”

“Seduce you? I cannot believe you - you’re about to wrap me up in a trash bag, and you accuse me of seducing you, as though -"

“Just hold your arm still.”

“Fuck you, too.”

Richie shook out the plastic bag and wrapped it around Eddie’s cast with a steady care that had Eddie overcome by the memory of him gently tucking Eddie’s arm into a sling made from his own jacket. 

“That ok?” Richie murmured, glancing at his face. Eddie nodded wordlessly and gave in to the impulse to kiss him; Richie still sounded surprised by it, every time, a little quiet noise of shocked elation as Eddie pressed his lips against Richie’s closed mouth.

“You know,” Eddie said, stomach quivering at his own daring, “It’s usual to be naked in preparation for taking a shower.”

Richie stared at him. “You got it,” he said, hands already on the waistband of his shorts. “You got it, Eds.”

Once the shorts were discarded, Richie had reached tentatively for Eddie’s t-shirt, as though he expected to be rebuffed. Eddie had watched him, heart hammering in his chest, and found he wanted nothing more than to let Richie do this; peel him out of his clothes, still warm from sleep. It was the kind of tender moment he’d always thought he would have hated, but that was before he'd experienced the insistent, trembling joy that wanted to burst right out of him every time Richie’s fingers brushed against his flushed skin. He watched Richie stretch the dark cotton over his cast to ease the t-shirt off of him, then abandon it at their feet. He expected himself to care about it, to insist that Richie fold their clothes and lay them somewhere they wouldn’t get wet, but he carried on watching as Richie slipped long fingers beneath the waistband of his shorts, and said nothing. Richie guided the shorts off his hips and dropped them to the floor and Eddie stepped out of them, one hand curling around Richie’s wrist as it steadied him. 

Richie helped him step, carefully, into the shower, broken arm held carefully out of the spray. It was awkward and cramped but Richie followed him in, and Eddie turned his face upwards, let the water soak into his hair, so hot it felt just on the right edge of painful. 

He doesn’t know how it happened, wishes he could recall who reached for each other first, but he found himself grasping Richie’s arms as they snaked around him, felt Richie’s face pressing into the wet skin of his shoulder.

“Eddie -“ Richie had said, sounding suspiciously close to tears, and Eddie shuffled around, arm at an awkward angle, plastic bag rustling under the spray, until he could hold Richie properly, one hand coming up to press Richie’s face into his skin, until Richie was clinging to him, mouth open and gasping in the crook of his neck. 

“I don’t want you making me any fucking promises,” he'd mumbled into Richie's damp skin, once they disentangled themselves and Richie had helped Eddie wash his hair with that Godforsaken two-in-one shampoo. “Not until all this bullshit’s over. Myra, the divorce - I want - I want to start again. I want it to be clean -"

Richie sighed out a hot breath against his temple. "Whatever you want, Spagheds. I'm a patient man."

"Fucking liar."

Richie had tensed, stumbled over the words collecting on his tongue, perhaps because he wasn't used to being able to throw such sentiments out into the world uncensored. “Waited this long, didn't I?”

"Fucking lying sap,” Eddie replied, and Richie laughed, and licked into his mouth until Eddie's hands were curling into the back of his wet hair and he had to haul himself away, breathing rough and hot into the space between them.

“Just so you know, I really want to blow you,” Richie had muttered. “Or were you planning on making me wait for that, too?"

“Jesus fucking Christ, you can’t just fucking come out with shit like that -”

“It’s the novelty, I’ll get over it eventually.”

“I fucking hope not,” Eddie replied, and all of his good intentions had gone completely to hell, because there was a long moment in which they'd looked at each other with an unfamiliar kind of stillness, measuring and considered, and then Richie had been sliding to his knees on the floor of the bath, swearing because there wasn’t enough space for his freakishly long legs. His big hands had been bracketing Eddie’s hips and steering him to lean back against the cold tiles, and Richie had been staring up at him, saying, “can I?” like nothing he’d ever asked for had meant more to him than the urgency of getting his mouth on Eddie’s rapidly hardening cock.

So, Eddie’s determination not to make it just a sex thing had gotten off to a shaky start. It had been years - possibly over a decade - since Myra had last offered to do this for him and then rolled over gratefully when Eddie had said he was too tired. He’d been relieved at the time that they appeared to have come to an agreement that such things weren’t necessary between them; he’d spent a lot of his time reassuring himself about all the ways he and Myra weren’t like everybody else. 

The thing was, Richie’s hands had been trembling, his fingers slipping on Eddie’s wet skin, and Eddie had wanted so badly to let him go to town, to experience what it might be like to have this for himself and actually _want it_ , the way he couldn’t remember wanting anything else, ever. Richie had gagged on him, had to pull back to wipe his mouth, but he’d shot Eddie a wrecked grin, like he wouldn’t rather have been doing anything else in the world than choking on Eddie’s dick. When he got straight back to it, Eddie had realised Richie was jacking himself off, one hand moving frantically just out of sight, his eyes slipping closed as he made a noise of such intense pleasure Eddie thought he might catch fire right then and there. That was what had tipped him over the edge, in the end; the fact that this was he and Richie doing something he’d always imagined would be carried out in sordid desperation, and it had turned out instead to be the purest, most vital kind of happiness he could ever remember experiencing. 

Richie had wiped him down afterwards, pressed ardent, loose-limbed kisses behind his ear, steered him out of the shower and back into the bed, and Eddie had tried to grant himself permission not to think about any of the rest of it for a while.

So when Richie asked him quietly, that night in Derry, “Had you already left her, when you turned up here?” he nodded, even though it was much more complicated than that. It seemed to be what Richie wanted to hear, because he pressed his closed mouth to Eddie’s shoulder like he was comforting him.

Leaving Myra had had little to do with Richie. Well, little to do with Richie in the sense that it was always, ultimately about Richie, the itch in his hind-brain, the thing he’d always denied himself. At the time, though, he hadn’t even remembered Richie properly. He’d heard Mike’s voice and crashed his car and decided he was leaving all in the space of twenty minutes. He’d gone home, packed two suitcases and heaved them down the front steps, leaving Myra shrill and indignant in his wake. He’d only stopped to wonder what he’d done once he was halfway to LaGuardia, face pressed into the steering wheel and breath coming quick and uneven in the parking lot of a run-down Denny's, wondering if Myra would take him back if he said the right things, made it clear he was suffering a mid-life crisis and just needed a bigger car and a holiday in Cancun to make him feel like himself again.

“I knew as soon as Mike called,” Eddie said, quietly, loathe to break the spell the darkness had cast over them, granting permission for them to whisper these things at one another that were too dangerous to be examined in the light of day just yet. “I knew something was wrong. Didn’t you?”

“Oh, I’d known for a long time,” Richie said with a grimace that Eddie could just perceive through the darkness of Richie’s unlit room. “Guess it was nice to finally be able to put a face to the name. ‘Oh, the reason for your existential homophobic self-hatred? That would be the time you got gay-bashed by Paul Bunyan’.”

Eddie kissed him, because he hated hearing Richie talk about himself with wry, detached self-deprecation, like he was doing a bit for an audience.

It had been exquisitely painful to be flayed open in the dilapidated cocoon of Richie’s twin bed and then to have to put himself together again in the morning. Despite that, he finds himself to be pining for Derry, for the shock of the new and the ease of kissing Richie in the syrupy late afternoon in the middle of that horrible twin bed.

-

When Richie returns from the meeting, his face says he’s one ill-judged sentiment from punching a hole in a wall. It makes Eddie, who’s spent the past three hours googling New York divorce law, step down temporarily from his impending nervous breakdown.

“Went well, huh?”

Richie groans, letting his head drop back onto his shoulders, the long column of his neck an unfair distraction, in Eddie’s biased opinion. 

“Can we just stay here for the next fifty years?” He says, sounding exhausted. "Literally, right here? Until we’re both dead and they find our desiccated corpses entwined upon the couch. We don’t actually need food, or jobs, or interaction with other humans.”

“Yeah, screw that, I’ve got material needs."

“Fucking traitor,” Richie mutters. He kicks off his sneakers and dumps the messenger bag and jacket in a heap on the hallway floor. It makes Eddie’s fingers twitch, but Richie looks so defeated he forgoes making a point of hanging them up in favour of braving Richie’s appalling fridge.

When he follows him into the living room, Richie is sprawled on the couch, his head on the armrest, feet up, his long legs bent to accommodate his height. He opens one eye when Eddie sets two cold bottles next to him on the floor, and then wraps long fingers around Eddie’s wrists, tugging him off-balance.

“Dude, there’s no fucking space - “

“Good job you’re so tiny.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie mutters as he settles into the space Richie has made for him.

It is, he supposes he can admit, nice. He feels vaguely ridiculous bracketed along Richie’s side against the back of the couch. They're touching along the whole length of Richie’s lanky body and Eddie can feel the warmth of him through his clothes, giving off heat like a furnace so that Eddie’s too hot, but otherwise too comfortable to move. He's never lain like this with another human being, not since they were kids and curling up together like pack animals was he and Richie’s default, tessellating around one another the minute either of them stopped moving long enough. 

“What’d they say about the tour?” Eddie asks, once he’s gotten over the urge to squirm away from Richie’s hand when it settles on the small of his back, pressing him closer.

Richie sighs. “I’m contractually obligated. Short of my actual death or dismemberment, there’s no way I’m getting out of the dates after Sacramento without pissing money I don’t have down the drain.”

Eddie murmurs a noise of sympathetic dismay and nudges Richie’s shoulder with his nose. It should feel ridiculous, pawing at him like this, but Richie closes his eyes, leans in until Eddie’s closed mouth rests against his arm through the threadbare t-shirt. Eddie is learning not to allow the kind of happiness this sort of thing elicits to startle him.

“I’ve, uh - I’ve got some ideas for new material,” Richie says, after a long, quiet moment. "Can’t go in the show yet, it’ll need to be workshopped. But it’s something. A change.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t improv some of that shit." 

Richie shrugs. “Suppose I could road test a couple of things.”

“Just don’t let any of it be about my mom. Or a giant killer space clown.”

Richie looks at him, then, twisting his neck to peer at Eddie earnestly, a frown pulling his brow into a crumple of concern. “Look, all that dumb shit about the imaginary girlfriend - I can’t get rid of that, not without some major fucking re-writes...”

Eddie realises they haven’t talked about this. About the fact that Richie is, in a small way, other people’s property. It hasn’t occurred to him to try to fit this new, privately tended spark growing between them into the wider landscape of Richie’s public life. 

“I’m not expecting you to - to come out, or some bullshit,” he says hastily.

“It’s not bullshit,” Richie says. “It wouldn’t be bullshit. I just - I haven’t even told Brandon, and it’d need a whole load of new material to replace it, and as soon as I said anything people’d be wanting details…”

“Sounds like you’ve got a inflated idea of your own importance -“

“Fuck you, you know what I mean. I can’t do it right now, Eds. I can’t.”

“Hey,” Eddie says, hating himself for bringing it up in the first place. He touches Richie’s face with the fingers of his uninjured hand. It still feels thrilling and illicit even to be touching him in such a manner as this, soft and taking his time. “I’m not asking you to. You think I’m ready for all of that, either? Who gives a fuck about anybody else. We’ve fucking earned this.”

Richie kisses him, reaching up to cup the back of his head. Eddie lets him tug him closer, lets Richie manhandle him until they’re pressed together from sternum to ankles, until Richie’s dick is digging into the hollow of his hip and he’s gasping into Richie’s neck, swearing sweatily into the too-long hair curling behind Richie’s ear. 

“Seriously?” Eddie gasps, “we’re gonna do this here?”

“You mean you don’t want to come in your pants like a teenager? Make some of those memories we missed out on?”

Eddie thanks the Lord that there’s still something about Richie that makes words fall out of his mouth - obscene, filthy words that would have made him combust two weeks ago - because he’s able to say, with complete sincerity, “I want to spread you out on an actual bed. I want to take my fucking time.”

Richie’s expression would be comical if he wasn’t grinding his dick into Eddie’s thigh in a very distracting way and making a desperate noise in the back of his throat. “Fuck. That’s a great big fucking yes to that plan. Lead the way.”

“Yeah, in a minute,” Eddie says, because Richie’s hands are on his ass and there’s literally nothing for him to do except grind into Richie’s thigh and suck Richie’s tongue back into his mouth.


	3. Chapter 3

“I’m gonna need to go back,” Eddie says, later that evening. Richie’s soft and rumpled, wearing sweatpants and a warm, thin shirt that Eddie wants to put his hands all over. He’s nose-deep in his second mug of coffee and he peers at Eddie over its rim like he’s speaking Esperanto. “The divorce is gonna take time, and there’s my job.”

Richie’s holding the mug in front of him like it’s a shield. An hour ago they stumbled out of bed and pulled on an approximation of clothing; Eddie’s wearing his own sweatpants and an aged t-shirt of Richie’s, the thought of which, if he focuses on it, makes him feel both elated and really fucking anxious. They’d ordered takeout again - Thai, this time - and sat on the couch with Eddie’s feet tucked under Richie’s leg, Richie’s music murmuring softly in the background.

“Yeah, of course,” Richie says, infinitely reasonable. 

Eddie shrugs, watching the way Richie’s eyes slide right off him, like oil on water, only to settle back on his face moments later, calm and accepting in a way that seems unlikely until he remembers those quiet times on their own in the Clubhouse. The long afternoons stretched out in that stupid fucking hammock reading comics and the creep of Richie’s sticky fingers along the outside of his thigh.

“It’s pretty important I’m there, just to make sure everything goes ok."

“Yeah,” Richie agrees, “makes sense.”

He’s got the mildest smile on his face, like the conversation is of only the slightest interest to him, and he turns away immediately to pour the rest of his coffee down the drain, running cold water into the mug and setting it upside down on the draining board.

“It makes sense,” Eddie repeats, unsure why he feels nauseated. “I’ll, uh. Book a flight for tomorrow, then.”

“Sounds good,” says Richie over his shoulder as he heads in the direction of the bathroom.

Eddie sits at the counter listening to the hiss of the shower, the sound of spray against the tiles of Richie’s ridiculous wet room. He intends to wait for Richie to reemerge, because he wants to ask him about leaving some clothes behind, wants to make a gesture that demonstrates something, he doesn’t know what, but he knows it’s important. When, after ten minutes, Richie hasn’t appeared, he makes his own way in the direction of the bathroom.

When he knocks and pushes open the door, he can see Richie outlined behind the shower screen, standing under the spray, very still, as though frozen in the middle of washing his hair. 

“Rich?” Eddie says, carefully, not wanting to startled him. Richie glances at him, smile blooming on his face a moment too late. 

“Eds! Couldn’t bear to be without me, huh?”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Me going back to New York… It’s not a big deal, ok? I just have shit to sort out - my job, Myra - I can’t do it all over the phone.”

Richie nods, face solemn, hair in his eyes. “I know that. Listen, you don’t - you don’t fucking owe me anything.”

“I know that, dickwad,” Eddie snaps, frowning. “But maybe I want to, alright? I want you to fucking understand.”

Richie stares at him helplessly. “Some of it, I can’t. You got married, dude. That’s _way_ out of my experience.”

“You want me to apologise for it?” 

“No, I don’t want you to fucking apologise,” Richie says. “I want us not to be having this conversation while I’m stark fucking naked.”

“Fine." Eddie knows, logically, that the solution is for him to back off, to allow Richie to finish his shower in peace, to resume the discussion later, when both of them are calm and able to talk sensibly. But arguments with Myra have taught him the fear of allowing resentment to fester. Arguments mean silence, and judgment, and being made to feel like the shittiest person in the world until he eventually apologises, and he can’t bear to let this thing with Richie be tarnished by that sort of bullshit. He strips off Richie’s t-shirt and his old sweatpants and joins Richie under the shower before he has a chance to persuade himself to retreat.

“Uh, hi?” Richie says, clearly perplexed. 

“Shut the fuck up, Richie,” Eddie says and kisses him. He wants to crawl right inside Richie just as fervently as he wants to run as far as he can in the opposite direction. If this is a test, it’s one he’s going to pass, because he’s sick of feeling less than in control. Richie gets arms around him immediately and Eddie is assailed again by the enormity of what they’ve done, what they continue to do; the fact that Richie wants him in this ardent, steadfast sort of way is still, frankly, astonishing.

They turn off the shower and go back to the bedroom without saying a word. Richie nudges Eddie until he’s splayed out on the bed, droplets of water running off his wet skin and dampening the comforter, and quietly takes Eddie apart. His mouth is so hot, his hands on Eddie’s hips, around the base of him, curling under his ass, so fucking careful. Eddie puts a hand over his face, hopes Richie hasn’t noticed that his cheeks are wet from more than just the shower, but then Richie’s crawling up his body, kissing him with a mouth that tastes of come, lifting Eddie’s hand away, kissing the corners of his eyes, the damp skin at his temple, breathing heavily into his wet hair. 

"Do you need me to come with you?” Richie says. "Seriously, fuck the tour. Fuck it, we can fly out tomorrow and get your shit done instead.”

Eddie shudders, Richie’s breath cool on the back of his neck. “It’s my shit to deal with,” he says miserably. “It’s not your fucking problem.”

-

Saying goodbye at LAX would probably have been the worst experience of Eddie’s entire life, clowns and Henry fucking Bowers included. It wouldn’t be dramatic; there wouldn’t be any tears or declarations. Richie would just look so fucking sad, and would be trying to pretend he wasn’t, and Eddie already feels guilty enough for wanting to get away, to escape for a little while to the familiarity of New York. What they’ve built over the past five days can’t stand up to public scrutiny yet, Eddie knows that much. It’s been constructed entirely within the walls of Richie’s terrible hotel room, and lately within the walls of Richie’s terrible apartment, and exposure to the light might cause it to degrade, a process he won’t know how to arrest once it begins. He imagines standing awkwardly at the departures gate, both of them keeping their hands to themselves and muttering a bunch of platitudes. The awfulness of it makes his skin crawl.

In the end, he just calls an Uber. He kisses Richie until their mouths are sore, then closes the apartment door behind him when his phone alerts him that the car has arrived. There’s a part of him that’s waiting for the forgetting to begin, anticipating the way that Richie’s face will slide from his grasp, and then his name, and then any knowledge of how he’s spent the past ten days. It makes him want to demand that the driver turn around and deposit him back at Richie’s door, so he can crawl back inside and abandon all thoughts of leaving. Instead, he repeats his own personal mantra, _IT’s dead, IT’s dead, you won’t forget_ , until the words lose all meaning and his fingernails are digging crescent moons in the faux-leather seat cover.

He itches with the need to send a reassuring message, or one seeking reassurance, but he restrains himself, waits til he’s touched down at LaGuardia and is standing in line at baggage reclaim waiting for his two enormous suitcases to reappear. He’s dragged them all the way across the country twice; the futility of it all, the fact that it feels like he’s right back where he started, makes him want to scream. It isn’t true, he knows that; he’s a different person from the Eddie Kaspbrak who flew out of New York without really knowing what he was flying into, just over a week before. Just over a week. It seems ridiculous, that everything could change so much, in such a short space of time.

_Landed_ , he types, _I’ll call you_.

It takes fifteen minutes for the reply to appear on his screen, and both times he’s checked in the meantime, while making his way back to the long stay parking lot, there have been three intermittent dots telling him Richie has spent a long time composing his response. He’s disappointed when he doesn’t even need to open the notification to read it in its entirety: _Not if I call you first_.

He’s got the cases on a trolley, but heaving them into the car one-handed proves nearly impossible. He’s on the verge of a meltdown, humiliated that this should be the ignominious beginning to his supposedly triumphal return to New York, when with a snarl he manages to shove the second case into the trunk. He slams it shut and stands panting and cursing for a moment, regretting that he ignored all the good advice about bending with the knees, feeling foolish and incapable. He knows what Richie would be saying if he were here, now: _You’re braver than you think, Eds. You can do anything you put your mind to._

The problem is, he has ample proof that it’s true, but it doesn’t mean he entirely believes it. 

The thought of returning to the house is too horrible to contemplate. To have left Richie less than eight hours ago and have to look Myra in the eye would be too much to bear. Time to check himself into a hotel and work out what the fuck Eddie Kaspbrak does, with no one but himself for company and the world open and expansive before him in a way he can’t remember it ever having been before. It’s a sad commentary on his existence that _this_ , his own company and the freedom to make his own decisions, is the most terrifying thing he’s faced all week.


	4. Chapter 4

In the car on the way to the airport hotel, Eddie tells Siri to call Bill Denbrough, thrilled and unnerved by the idea that he has friends, now - real friends, not colleagues, or acquaintances, or people from Myra’s work - whose numbers are stored in his phone. He wonders if this is what it feels like to have family, outside of his ma and a handful of aunts and uncles, to know there are people out there who know him, love him, inside and out. The phone rings out without Bill picking up, but his voicemail message conveys a steady, dependable sort of support, so Eddie tells him everything’s fine, he’ll call again tomorrow. 

He reaches the hotel, doesn’t bother taking the cases out of the trunk, just checks himself in and stumbles into a room too dark for him to discern whether it’s better or worse than the one he left behind at the Town House. Without turning on the lights he manages to find the bathroom and take a piss, then throws himself face down on the bed and waits for sleep to claim him. 

The following morning brings with it a pressing awareness of the need to put on fresh clothes. His own body odor is enough to make the indignity of wrapping his cast in yet another trash bag worth the cost; he showers, dresses, dashes to the car for a fresh set of clothes and returns to the room to change.

He's spent the time in the shower strategizing, considering how best to schedule the many unpleasant tasks ahead, so when he emerges into gritty New York sunlight, he’s already itemising his mental list, tossing up the options of paying a visit to Myra or the company and deciding that discretion might still be the better part of valor where Myra is concerned. It’s cowardly, he knows it is, but he needs to start his day by achieving something, not arguing himself round in circles with his wife. An insidious voice tells him _It won’t do you any good to run, Eddie_ , but he squashes it down, because he throttled that leper good and proper and there’s no reason to still be thinking about it, now.

He’s borrowed letter paper and a ballpoint pen from the bemused teenager on the hotel reception desk and has a letter tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket with his boss’ name on the envelope. It’s imperative, he thinks, that he get straight on the I-278 and head downtown, or he’ll give up on the whole endeavour and book himself a flight straight back to LA.

His lawyer - his and Myra’s lawyer - occupies an office across the street from Eddie’s company building. He figures it’s going to be like laying down a one-two punch, serving papers on Myra and a letter to his boss, getting the pain over quickly and emerging in an hour’s time with bloodied knuckles but, hopefully, victory under his belt. It’s an excellent plan, and it nearly falls apart immediately when Bob Woolmer has the audacity to claim not to be available for a meeting until the following week. Eddie knows this is bullshit, because Bob is neither important enough nor good enough at his job to be so in demand. Besides which, the arrangement has always been that Eddie can call on Bob whenever the need arises, because Bob and Laura come to dinner at the Kaspbraks’ the first Friday of every month, and Eddie’s always had first dibs on Bob’s Knicks season ticket when he isn’t in town, even though he can’t fucking stand basketball. Before Derry, Eddie would have said that he and Bob are what passes for friends.

He’s in the middle of explaining this, somewhat fractiously, to Bob’s receptionist, when Bob’s office door opens and Bob appears, ushering Eddie inside with a reassuring hand on Eddie’s shoulder and a smile on his face that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 

“Eddie, good to see you,” he says, offering Eddie his hand. 

“Yeah, hi, Bob,” Eddie replies, hoping Bob knows exactly what he thinks of Bob’s shitty hospitality. "I just got back from a trip and I need to get some affairs in order."

“Eddie,” Bob interrupts. "I should let you know, before we go any further, that I’ve been instructed by your wife to open divorce proceedings on her behalf.”

Eddie guesses it makes him a dick, that he’d assumed Myra wouldn’t have the wherewithal in his absence to seek legal advice. After his disappearing act to the ass-end of New England and subsequent garbled voicemail about being hospitalised and in love with his best friend, he’d just sort of assumed that Myra would have been - what? In some kind of suspended animation, patiently awaiting his return?

“Instructed?” He repeats, hoping for clarification.

Bob shrugs. “She told me the whole story, man. The breakdown, high-tailing it to California. I’ll be honest, I’m impressed.”

“What?”

“Who wouldn’t want to skip town for some girl on the West Coast? Thing is, I have to advise you to find alternative legal representation.”

“Why the fuck is that?”

Bob gives a rueful, guilty shrug. “Can’t advise you both,” he says. “It’s nothing personal. I’ve still got those Knicks tickets if you’re in town, though I guess you’ll have to be a Lakers man, from now on."

Eddie has endured enough corporate sports events, enough hours pretending to enjoy these bullshit male bonding rituals, that the freedom to be able to tell Bob what he can do with his Knicks tickets swells within him in a triumphant bubble of rage and joy. He wonders if this is what madness feels like, this compulsion to let the truth come pouring out of him, who cares if it sweeps away everything he’s ever previously thought was important. It’s what the situation calls for; a biblical flood, a new start. Tabula fucking rasa, and damn the consequences. If it turns out that the deluge he releases is destructive, he and Richie will rise above it all on their fucking ark and… the metaphor runs away from Eddie at this point, because Bob’s staring at him. He’s let Bob’s all-men-together bullshit fall flat, and Bob hates him for it, he sees that now.

He shoves his chair away from Bob’s desk, away from the framed picture of Bob and Laura and their two boring children, away from Bob’s condescending, sympathetic smile. “It’s not a girl on the West Coast, Bob, it’s a guy. Fuck you, and fuck the Knicks.”

-

Three hours later, back in his hotel room, nerves steadied by a double neat vodka from the tiny bottle he found in the minibar, Eddie has his phone in his hand and is listening to Richie’s voicemail tell him not to bother leaving a message because Richie won’t get back to him.

He went straight from Bob’s office to the company, deciding against a second showdown in favour of handing his letter of resignation to the CEO’s PA and hightailing it out of the building before any of his colleagues could spot him. He nearly made it; Nick - or maybe Brad, Eddie doesn’t fucking know - from marketing, with whom he’s only ever exchanged banal platitudes about the gym, caught him in the elevator and asked with insincere concern about Eddie's accident. 

Eddie has no idea what story Myra’s spun to save face with the company, so he laid it out in bare, perfunctory sentences: the divorce, the relocation. When the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, Nick-or-Brad was staring at him as if he were clearly in the grip of an ongoing breakdown and Eddie had fled, telling himself he didn’t care for Brad’s pity or his assumptions. By the time he got back to the hotel he was trembling and furious and did the first thing he could think of, fumbling the cap off the vodka one-handed while he dialled Richie’s number on speakerphone.

It’s only when he’s listening to the silence following Richie’s voicemail message that he realises he really isn’t in any state to speak to him. He scrambles to cancel the call and winces to think of Richie checking his messages later and listening to thirty seconds of a grown man ugly-crying into a hotel pillow. He knocks back the last of the vodka and scrolls down to his second-most recent call instead. This time he really fucking hopes someone picks up. 

“Eddie,” Bill says, sounding surprised and pleased. It sends a brief shot of warmth down Eddie’s spine that someone should sound so fucking happy to hear from him. “I saw you’d called. Sorry, I was writing late last night, had everything on silent. Everything alright?”

It’s on the tip of Eddie’s tongue to confirm that everything’s fine, to ask about Bill’s progress on the new book and spend a comforting half hour kicking the shit about something inconsequential, like the fact Ben and Bev just got a dog, which is one step away from having a baby, as far as Eddie’s concerned, and he and Myra never got a dog in twelve years of marriage because it had seemed like too much of a commitment. 

“Uh. I don’t know? I’m back in New York and Myra’s divorcing me. Richie’s still in LA. I just quit my job.”

What’s the fucking point of having friends, actual friends, not Bob and Brad and the other assholes, but people he’d call just to hear the sound of their voice, if not to tell them the truth? It comes bubbling up right on cue, spilling out of him against his will, a wave that just keeps coming and coming. "I think I just came out to my lawyer, and a douchebag from work that I met in an elevator. I don’t think I’m ok, Bill.”

He hears Bill take a breath, the sound of him moving, perhaps walking into another room, a door being softly closed. “Okay,” Bill says, quiet and concerned. “Okay, talk to me.”


	5. Chapter 5

Eddie’s got the tour schedule memorised. Yesterday, Albuquerque; in two days’ time, Colorado Springs. Tonight, Richie’s installed in a hotel somewhere halfway between the two, which means that maybe Eddie will get to speak to him for the first time in what feels like months. He’s so fucking tired of pretending it isn’t a big deal.

When he checks his phone, Richie's left him a voicemail, presumably straight after he got off the stage the previous night. 

_“Dude, I got your message. Are you ok? Text me.”_

He sounds buzzed but concerned and Eddie spends pleasant, guilty moments imagining what would have happened had Eddie been there, after the show. Richie would have been anxious and hopped up on adrenaline and he’d have crowded Eddie against a wall and put his massive hands all over him and let Eddie cop a feel of those huge fucking shoulders that Richie really hasn’t earned through time at the gym and let Eddie lick the sweat off the stubble at the corner of his jaw. How Eddie ever convinced himself he was straight, he has no idea, because the thought of Richie - broad, soft-bellied, foul-mouthed Richie - pushing him around gets him hot under the collar like nothing else ever has. 

Eddie calls again, certain he won’t get through, but hoping anyway. He lets it ring out, knowing Richie’s fast asleep, face down on a hotel bed.

_I’m fine,_ he texts, _Bill talked me down. Shitty day yesterday. Call me when you can?_

In the meantime, Eddie has another, more arduous conversation waiting for him. He’s weighed the pros and cons of turning up at the house, and has spent the morning, in between exasperating phone conversations with his bank making sure his savings will cover a few months of a stateless existence between East and West coast, berating himself for his reluctance. He’s afraid, and he can’t be sure whether it’s fear of his inability to stand up for himself, or of Myra’s reaction. It’s never occurred to him to be scared of her before, but he’s started suffering these dreams where she keeps him there, locked up in the dark, trapped in a prison of his own making.

“Myra,” he says, when she picks up the phone. He’s seated at the end of the bed in the hotel room and he’s folded his jacket over his knee. The fingers of his left hand are compulsively smoothing the fabric, ridding it of wrinkles before crumpling it and starting all over again. 

“Eddie,” she replies. She’s icy and precise; he recognises it immediately as her wronged-women tone, the one she uses when he stays out a little late for after-work drinks and she sits up waiting for him with a glass of water and a lecture about muggings and the state of his liver. “I’m glad you finally decided to call.”

“Listen, Myra, I’m sorry - it’s been a rough few days, I only just got back to New York - “

“It’s been two weeks, Eddie. I’ve been waiting for you. That’s why I spoke to Bob, to make it clear that I won’t be pushed around like this anymore.”

“I get it,” Eddie says, in vague disbelief. Of all Myra’s possible reactions, he hadn’t anticipated this martyred acquiescence. “I do, and I’m sorry. I should have called sooner.”

“I’m just glad you have. My mother always said that when a marriage has lasted as long as ours, a man can get a need for his own space.”

“Well, that’s not entirely -“

“Eddie, I’m just glad you came back.”

“No, I'm not -“

“Eddie,” she says, and he hates the fact that he feels chastened. “I think we should all just be happy that you got these things out of your system. I haven’t texted, and I haven’t called, because I knew you just needed some time to work these things through."

“Myra,” Eddie says, his fingers sweatily clutching creases into the jacket. She sounds like she expects him to find her magnanimous and noble, for honouring his request not to contact him while he fled to LA. “That’s really, really, not what happened.”

“Oh, I don’t want details, thank you. I don’t want to hear about whatever it is you think you've accomplished.” She takes a breath, and the bite falls out of her tone, replaced by a sickening, determined kind of affection. "I’m so pleased to have you home, Eddie-bear, and I know that going forward, things are going to be so much better."

Eddie’s stomach lurches. “Myra,” he says. "I already told you, I’m not coming home.”

“Of course you are. You came back to New York; I knew you would, once you had time to realise how silly this whole thing has been.”

“Then why the fuck,” Eddie says, exhaling through his nose, "have you told Bob Woolmer that you want a divorce?”

“Don’t yell at me, Eddie, you know I don’t like it when you do that. I told you, I asked Bob about a divorce because I needed to draw a line in the sand, to let you know that this is the last time I’ll put up with this nonsense.”

Eddie’s throat is tight. “Let me get this straight, you told Bob you want a divorce because you _don’t actually want a divorce?_ ”

“Don’t take that tone with me, Eddie.”

“Jesus Christ, Myra - _I_ want a divorce! I want one - me! - and I called to have a civilised conversation about it, because I was under the mistaken impression that we were on the _same fucking page_.”

“Eddie, why would I want a divorce? Because you made one tiny mistake and then came straight on home to fix it? Don’t be silly - “

“Why?” Eddie can feel himself slipping into the kind of vicious sarcasm that always makes Myra dissolve into tears. He hates himself for it, but there’s such frustration bubbling under his skin, the deluge, again, waiting to be unleashed. “For fuck’s sake, Myra, I ran away to Los Angeles because I’ve been fucking someone else. Was that not a _sign_ that maybe things weren’t going to be fixed?”

Silence hangs between them for a long, poisonous moment.

“Well, there’s absolutely no need to be vulgar,” Myra says, and her voice is tight and angry, the way it gets before Eddie usually says sorry for whatever it is he’s done wrong. “I _said_ , I don’t want details.”

He wonders how on earth he never noticed, before, how awful they are for one another. They’ve spent years circling each other like animals, snapping and snarling and wrapping themselves closer and closer around one another, feeling strangled and cosseted, and Eddie had always thought that that was what love was.

“Myra,” he says miserably, “I cheated on you. I’m sorry.”

“Stop it. Plenty of husbands have these moments of weakness, and couples work through it.”

“It wasn’t a moment of weakness - “

“Do you think you’re the first man to do something like this?” she says, low and demeaning and vicious. "It’s very unoriginal, Eddie, and it doesn’t make you special.”

Looking back, Eddie will realise this is the moment it becomes easier to tell Myra the truth. “Actually,” he snaps, "it’s really fucking _special_. I’ve been unhappy for years, Myra, and Richie - 

Myra scoffs. “‘Richie’. What sort of a name is that? I told you I don’t want to hear about your sordid little escapade - " 

“Well, I didn’t want plenty of the shit that went down this week. I know you don’t get it, I don’t think you could unless you’d been through what we’ve been through, but all this - my friends, Richie, being back in Derry - I can’t lie to myself anymore, Myra."

“‘What we’ve been through’. I knew those friends of yours were trouble,” Myra says, her voice curling cruelly. “I knew when they called I ought to have put a stop to it there and then, but you wouldn’t listen-“

“It’s nothing to do with my fucking friends!” Eddie snaps and can imagine the way she recoils - he’s momentarily ashamed of himself, feels the moral high ground slipping beneath his feet. He’s standing at the end of the hallway telling his mother he knows about the gazebos, and she’s starting to cry, fat tears spilling down her cheeks and onto her cotton housecoat. “It’s me! It’s just _me_.”

“And what about _me_?” Myra cries. “What about _me_ , Eddie? What do you expect me to do now? You think everyone gets to just go around worrying about their own _happiness_?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie says, tiredly. “I don’t fucking know, Myra.”

There’s silence between them for longer than Eddie can ever remember before. Usually, their conversations are rapid and tense, or rapid and cloying, or rapid and frightened. No wonder he never had any time to stop and fucking think. 

“Listen, Myra, I’ll sign the papers. You can have the house. Just - give me a day or two to sort out another lawyer, and I’ll sign anything you want me to."

He knows it’s the thing you’re not supposed to say and that his new lawyer will haul him over the coals for it, but he’s so tired of this conversation. For a second, he hopes he’s found the correct combination that will unlock the chain that’s been winding itself tighter and tighter around his chest the whole time Myra’s been talking. 

“Well, I’m just sorry you feel the need to resort to this kind of petulant gesture, Eddie,” she says, briskly. "When you’re ready to apologise, you can get in touch with Bob.”

_He was my lawyer first_ , Eddie finds himself wanting to retort, but he’s stymied by a click and blank silence at the end of the line. _Good for Myra_ , a mean, thin voice at the back of his mind sneers. _Good for her, you piece of shit_. Eddie shuffles it away, burying it within the stack of things he tells himself there is no need to give his time and credence to.

-

He'd intended to reward himself with a trip into Manhattan in the triumphant aftermath of the conversation he’d rehearsed in his head. He’d imagined a brisk victory lap of Central Park, followed by a French vanilla coffee at the little bakery on East 78th, and home in time for whiskey and Richie at the other end of his cell phone; in the event, he feels sick and listless, slopes round his own hotel room, gazes miserably at the view from the window (the Best Western across the Plaza and an expanse of sympathetically grey and turbid sky) and then returns to the bed to order room service. 

_How’d it go?_ Richie texts, halfway through the evening. 

Eddie has been doing push-ups on the bedroom carpet for fifteen minutes, concerned about the volume of home fries he’s consumed since discovering they could be summoned at the push of a button. He attempts to spring to his feet, is concerned by how difficult he finds it, and then further concerned that one side of his chest aches as though he’s pulled a muscle, even though he hasn’t engaged in the kind of exercise that should make that a possibility. 

He’s mulling this over, making himself promises about going for a run in the morning, even if it must be on one of the sweaty treadmills in the hotel’s godforsaken basement gym, when the phone in his hand begins to vibrate, almost startling him into dropping it.

“Hello?” He demands, pressing it to his ear, "Ben?”

“It’s Bev, I’m using his phone. Hi, Eddie.”

“Bev, hi. Is everything ok?”

“Do you think we’ll get to the stage at some point where we answer the phone to one another like normal human beings?” Bev muses. “Everything’s fine, I promise. Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, grabbing a towel from the rail in the bathroom. “You wouldn’t happen to have spoken to Richie recently, would you?”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Bev replies breezily. “But if I had, he might have mentioned something about a disagreement with your lawyer. I called to commiserate, and to pool our expertise. Turns out divorces are a bitch.”

Eddie snorts. “Who fuckin’ knew.”

Thank the Lord for Bev, Eddie acknowledges as she launches into a tirade about the fuss Tom is kicking up about the rights to the business. She’s righteous and foul-mouthed and she doesn’t require anything from him except that he listen and make the appropriate noises when she pauses for his input. It’s insanely good to hear her voice; it’s an overwhelming feeling, yet again, knowing he spent twenty-seven years doing without it.

“Have you got a good therapist?” She asks, apropos of nothing, at the end of her list of complaints.

Eddie blinks. “I did. Company insurance; I just quit.”

“Alright, Eddie! Richie said you were considering sticking it to the man, but I didn’t know if he meant it euphemistically, so I didn’t like to press for details.”

It occurs to Eddie, as Bev cackles filthily in his ear, to wonder exactly how often Richie and Bev have been speaking. Given that he can’t seem to catch Richie in one place for long enough to talk to him at all, he feels vaguely unhappy about the whole thing.

“Sorry, Eddie,” Bev says, more soberly. “Didn’t mean to be a dick.”

“Why not?” Eddie laughs bleakly. “It’s a joke. I spent my entire adult life thinking I was just... that guy who didn’t really like sex all that much. Guess how fuckin’ dumb I feel right about now.”

“Ew,” Bev says, “but also, we’re all very happy for you. Get some, Eddie."

“Gross. But thanks."

“Speaking of therapy,” Bev says, and Eddie knows with absolutely certainty that the conversation is about to take a turn he isn’t in any kind of mental shape to handle. 

“Can we not? I’m not fucking kidding, Bev, I am unemployed, and uninsured, and I’ve been in this fucking hotel room all fucking day, and I’ve already had to deal with Myra this afternoon, and I'm not one hundred percent sure I won’t fucking cry at you. I’ve already cried at Bill, by the way, and that was every bit as fucking humiliating as you might expect. I’m fine. You don’t need to check if I’m about to throw myself out of a window, I just really, really don’t want to talk about anything. I’m fine."

“Huh.”

“What do you mean, ‘huh’?”

“I didn’t realise you and Richie were both going to lean so hard into this lonely masochist routine.”

“What the fuck do you mean by that?"

“‘Bev,’” she says, in an uncanny impersonation of Richie at his most morose, "'let’s just call it what it is. He went away to try to work out if it’s worth his time coming back.'”

“That’s not fucking fair,” Eddie says, even though it maybe, sort of is. “It’s horrifying how swiftly you’ll break the confidences of a friend, by the way, and also that isn’t fucking true. Richie’s it for me, turns out he always has been, he knows that. I’m just sorting out my shit - it’s a temporary situation, and anyway he’s got the tour, not that it’s any of your fucking business.”

“I wholeheartedly concur,” Bev said. “Which is why I choose these next words with care and with compassion: have either of you learned to actually communicate since we killed that fucking clown?"

“Fuck you! We communicate plenty.”

“Eddie, I love you, but mom jokes and Star Wars memes do not count.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie repeats, tightly, because the video Richie sent him yesterday of Yoda singing the song about the seagulls had made him snort coffee through his nose. 

“I’m not trying to interfere, I promise - “

“Yeah, how could anyone possibly jump to that conclusion?”

“- I’m just worried about both of you. I’ve been having some pretty intense night terrors, Ben can’t look in a mirror without wanting to throw up. Are you doing ok?”

“Yeah, well, if I were as hideous as Ben I’d probably barf at my own reflection, too,” Eddie mutters. Bev laughs softly, humouring him, and he’s glad. He’s always liked the way she wears the edges off him. “I’m doing fine, really.” He sighs. “There will be a lot for my new therapist to unpack, but for now I’ve got more immediate concerns. Like finding myself a new fucking job.”

“I hear you. Just don’t be a stranger, okay? We’re here, all of us, if you need us. Not just Bill.”

It’s pointed, but well-deserved, and Eddie is grateful. He’s so grateful he can feel his eyes prickling and he wants more than anything to avoid crying at three out of his five friends in the space of forty-eight hours, if at all possible. 

“There was one other thing we talked about,” Bev says, quietly. “I owe you an apology, Eddie. I knew about Richie, when we were kids - and I suspected, you know, about the two of you. Should I have said something? Would it have helped?”

“I’d have thrown up on you,” Eddie says, imagining his panic even a few days ago if someone had held up a mirror and pointed out the shape and content of his desires. “I’d have yakked on you, then fled the state.”

Bev laughs softly. “I should have told you how much we all loved you.”

“Likewise,” Eddie says, feeling small and helpless. “We all knew how shitty it was for you at home, and we didn’t do a fucking thing."

“We were kids, Eddie,” Bev says gently, sadly. “We were just kids.”

He thinks about the fact that the universe inhabited by their parents and their teachers had seemed so distant and uncaring that even considering appealing for help had been unthinkable. He thinks about what Mike had called it, ’the Derry effect’, and how he still expects the universe to try and prove exactly how unworthy of its compassion it finds him. It’s shaped everything he’s wanted and needed ever since.

“I love you, Marsh,” he says, thickly.

“Back at you, Kaspbrak.”

Eddie ends the call and heads into the bathroom to dab at his eyes with a crumpled tissue. When he returns, another text has arrived in the meantime: _Santa Fe can kiss my ass. I miss your stupid, tiny face._

At this point, Eddie has gone 48 hours without speaking directly to Richie and the thought of hearing his voice makes Eddie want to cry with relief. He knows exactly what he’d like to do right now, which is crawl into bed and dial Richie’s number, and tell him all his revelations about his relationship with Myra, and the fact he thought about the leper again while he was walking to his car this morning and that’s why he’s spent the entire day holed up in his claustrophobic hotel room instead. He’d confess how afraid he is that Richie is so far away and living a life Eddie can’t even imagine, and how insecure that makes him feel, that he doesn’t know how Richie’s spending his time or who he’s spending it with. It’s what comes naturally to him, to blurt out all his unhealthy thoughts and cling to the person he flings them at. 

The thought of doing that to Richie, of making himself the weight around Richie’s neck when he’s halfway across the country and trying to get through the rest of the tour without cracking up, makes him feel physically sick. He hears Myra’s voice calling him _Eddie-bear_ , because she only ever did it when she wanted to leverage the spectre of his mother, and the fact that his mother had always liked her, right up until it had become obvious that there wasn’t room in Eddie’s life for two women who wanted to control him. 

_That ass belongs to me now,_ he replies, _you’d better not let Santa Fe anywhere near it._

Eddie is starting to appreciate quite how risky shacking up with Richie is going to be, if he ever actually manages to move to LA. He’s a codependent motherfucker, at the best of times. If he fucks it up, he’s done for. He doesn’t know how he’ll come back from it, because he can’t remember the last time there was anything in his life that mattered to him the way this does. It’s like he’s lived half a life, an existence made up of dull colours and muted conversations, bubble-wrap on all the corners, but since returning to Derry everything is suddenly saturated with colour and sound, sharp and fraught with danger. He’s feeling things in a way he hasn’t since he was fifteen years old and burning up with the need to push Richie away and pull him closer all at the same time. He’s so fucking glad he hadn’t had the courage to whisper his real fear to Bev; that the reality of Eddie Kaspbrak won’t live up to the fantasy Richie’s been dragging around with him all these years. That the real Eddie Kaspbrak is exactly what everyone’s always thought him to be; conventional and uninteresting and a coward. 

As though to reassure him, Richie sends Eddie a photo of his own bare, hairy ass, on one cheek of which he’s managed to scrawl, in purple Sharpie: PROPERTY OF EDWARD KASPBRAK, ESQ. 


	6. Chapter 6

When Eddie wakes up, the pillow is stuck to the side of his face with his own drool and all the lights are still on; he’s disoriented and his tongue feels three sizes too big for his mouth. 

When he scrambles for his phone, which he finds face down on the carpet and almost out of battery, he discovers three missed calls and a video message.

One call is from Bill; two are from Richie. They came through late last night, long after Eddie had slipped into anxious dreams, presumably after Richie reached his hotel and settled in for the night.

He realises he’s crouched over his phone in his underwear on the carpet of an airport hotel. He needs to drink a large glass of water and brush his teeth, not necessarily in that order. Despite this, he stays exactly where he is and opens the message. It's a twenty-second video clip of half of Richie’s face, his sweaty hair sticking up at wild angles. It looks like he’s in a bar, some underground dive with sticky tables and a jukebox, and there’s a hubbub of voices around him, making Eddie want to lean in closer to hear him. Richie points a finger into the air above his right shoulder and Eddie is nonplussed, unsure what Richie wants him to divine from it, but then Richie mouths along to the song and Eddie gets it: _don’t leave me hanging on the telephone._

The video cuts out and Eddie plays it twice more. Richie’s eyes are unfocussed, his smile just this side of melancholy. Eddie winces to imagine his hangover when he surfaces - he checks the time and estimates Richie won’t be up for at least another four hours. Today’s the break between shows, and Richie will be making the most of it; Eddie wishes, suddenly, that he was there with him, letting Richie sweat alcohol onto his skin in an unfamiliar hotel bed.

_Drink some water, you embarrassing reprobate_ , he types, signing it with an _x_.

Fourteen hours later, Eddie’s spent the day trudging from dingy apartment to dingy, overpriced apartment with a succession of realtors, and is beginning to wish he’d just resigned himself to sleeping under a bridge in Central Park. He stopped by his new lawyer’s office this morning. This is what he tells Bill when he calls to make sure Eddie was serious about not intending to throw himself out of a window; Eddie’s irritated and amused in equal measure by the fact that Bev really can’t seem to keep anything to herself. 

Richie sends him another video message just as Eddie’s parking the car at the hotel and he presses play as he’s waiting for the elevator up to his room. He feels himself start to smile and hopes no one’s watching, for fear they’ll be able to read in his face that he’s a sap for Richie Tozier. 

On the screen is a badly framed video of Debbie Harry’s face, filmed by Richie off someone else’s phone screen. _“Call me!”_ she demands before the video cuts off. Beneath that another message, thirty seconds later, saying: _you know, if you want to and you get time, cuz apparently Debbie’s a needy bitch and someone should have told her to chill so as not to come off as totally fucking desperate x_

Still smiling, Eddie thumbs to his contacts and listens to the dial tone as he waits for Richie to pick up.

It’s the first time he’s heard Richie’s voice since he closed the front door of Richie’s apartment three days ago, and the soft, crumpled, hopeful way Richie says “Eddie?” when he picks up has the corners of Eddie’s eyes prickling, his throat closing tightly around how lonely he’s felt all day, wandering round all those shitty places he doesn’t want to live.

“Hi, Richie.”

“It’s good to hear your voice,” Richie says, before clearing his throat. “I mean, sorry, dude. I know you’ve had shit to do.”

“Yeah, and you, how dare you not just sit around all day waiting for my calls.”

“Sorry, man, it’s been full-on.”

Eddie shakes his head, because this tentative, polite, questioning thing between is not what he wants at all. “Forget it. How was Albuquerque?”

“It was Albuquerque,” Richie replies, and Eddie is overwhelmed by the fact that he can tell that Richie is smiling.

“So, you still got my name on your ass?”

Richie cracks up, and it’s the best sound Eddie’s heard in nearly 72 hours.

-

“You remember that mix-tape you made me at the start of ninth grade?” Eddie says, some indeterminate amount of time later. “Holy fuck, I just remembered. I swear it was like, Blondie and Bowie and just, really impeccable, on the first side and then - what the fuck was that band you really fucking loved? _The Only Living Boy In New Cross_? Just that on the second side. Totally fucking weird.”

“Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine!” Richie crows, delighted. “That was an ode to your many virtues. ’The comfort and joy of feeling lost’ with you, you asshole. I just made you tape after tape full of fucking love songs, and songs about how much I wanted in your pants and you were completely fucking oblivious. It wasn’t even subtle; remember that one for your birthday that was just back-to-back Prince?”

“Well, excuse you, what moron thinks Carter USM is the band to woo someone with? It’s not even a fucking love song! It’s about the evils of capitalism, or some shit. Really fucking romantic.”

"Would you have preferred some Sophie B. Hawkins?”

“I specifically said I didn’t think you were any good at it, don’t make it worse.”

“I’ve been doing better recently, though, right?” Richie says, and Eddie can hear the grin stretching his face into a familiar expression of complete, shit-eating amusement.

“Smooth, dude. And yes, you’re doing a whole lot better.” 

Eddie flushes, naming, suddenly, the static that’s been prickling under his skin all evening. He wonders if Richie’s feeling it, too, if that’s why there’s been a weird undercurrent of tension hanging between them. It’s the same feeling he used to get in the Clubhouse when he’d wrestle Richie for possession of the hammock just because it was there, and he could, and it meant he’d get to put his hands all over Richie’s sticky skin for a full five minutes without anybody questioning it. 

Thing is, Eddie knows, in theory, how this works with long-distance relationships. Now that he and Richie seem to have found themselves in the middle of one, he knows there are ways to make the distance shrink, at least for the duration of a phone call. What he doesn’t know, is how to plug into the electricity he’s been feeling since he saw Richie’s stupid, drunken face on his video message, and turn it into something they both could use. It makes him reckless and horny and desperate, except he doesn’t know - he really has no fucking clue - where to start. 

“Rich,” he says quietly, but he’s interrupted by the distant sound of knocking on Richie’s hotel room door and Richie swearing under his breath.

“Shit, sorry, Eds,” he says, sounding genuinely remorseful. “Said I’d go get dinner with the crew.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll keep,” Eddie says, despite regretting it immediately. “Go, go.”

“Talk later?” Richie says, and it’s probably Eddie’s imagination that makes it sound like a promise, but he murmurs his assent and Richie hangs up, already telling someone at the other end of the line that they’re a douche.

So Eddie is left half-hard in his jeans contemplating another lonely night with Stephen Colbert and his own right hand for company. Disappointment doesn’t begin to cover it.

-

Half an hour later, when he’s already in his underwear and propped up against the headboard balancing a Caesar salad on his lap, because it’s the only thing on the room service menu to even be on speaking terms with the notion of leafy greens, his phone chirps.

_Tell me if I’m way off the mark_ , the message reads, _but just hearing your voice made me really fucking horny._

_Dude,_ he replies, _are you sexting me from work?_

_Technically, I guess. Why, does it turn you on?_

Eddie has literally no idea how to answer that, because how can Richie not know that the answer is obvious.

He settles for: _You’d better get back to me on that when you’re not in public._


	7. Chapter 7

It’s gone midnight by the time Eddie gets another message. He hits the mute button on the TV so hard he nearly dislocates a finger.

_You still up?_

Eddie rolls his eyes. _You’re kidding, right?_

_I don’t think that qualifies as an answer._

“For fuck’s sake, Richie,” he mutters. _In all senses, you asshole._

_Wow,_ Richie responds, and then, _I’m glad, me too._

Eddie suddenly can’t stop himself picturing Richie, hard and unclothed, sprawled on his own hotel bed and hesitating, dancing around the edges of Eddie’s hang-ups and sensibilities. He fumbles to scroll to Richie’s number and waits breathlessly for him to answer. 

"Are we doing this?” He asks, as soon as Richie picks up. "For real?"

"I fucking hope so,” Richie says. "You had me at ‘better get back to me’. I’m so hard you could cut glass with this thing."

‘This thing’ turns out to be Richie’s dick; Eddie knows this because the next message he receives is a photo of the view down Richie’s body to his large hand curled around it. Eddie acknowledges hysterically how ridiculous it is that a picture of a cock he has swallowed down and jerked off on numerous occasions should cause him to completely lose his fucking mind, but here he is. Blinking at his phone and suddenly so hard in his pants that he thinks he might be seeing stars.

“Too far?” Richie asks quietly in his ear.

Eddie takes a deep, steadying breath. “I know we said we weren’t talking about _before_ and shit, but have you done this before?”

“Sent dick pics, or phone sex?” Richie asks, sounding surprised. “Couple of times, under the guise of an assumed persona. Neither made me feel great about myself afterwards, if you were wondering.”

“We really don’t have to do this-“

“Eds. I’ve been hard since you picked up the phone; that means I really fucking want to, but it doesn’t mean we will, if you’re not 100% into this.”

Eddie pauses, because he doesn’t know how to put into words the things he wants. This has always been his fucking problem: rant about his many dissatisfactions for days, but utterly fail to articulate the one thing he craves in his bones. 

“Are you into this, Eds?” Richie asks. There’s a hitch in his breath, a barely perceptible tremor in the exhalation at the other end of the line.

“Are you already fucking _touching yourself?_ ” Eddie whispers. The thought of it is maddening, that Richie couldn’t even fucking wait. Eddie is completely and utterly outraged and completely, utterly thrilled, his fingers already slipping under the waistband of his shorts.

“Unless you have any objections,” Richie says. He sounds strained, and Eddie knows he’s probably already jacking himself off. Maybe he’s thumbing over the head of his cock, letting himself enjoy the build-up. Eddie’s witnessed it in person, but somehow, in this context, the thought of it is one thousand times even more electrifying. He supposes it’s now or fucking never.

“Fuck,” Eddie says, curling his fingers around himself and feeling the tug of pleasure behind his navel. Richie’s breath is loud and tense in his ear, a low noise that fills him up from the inside, leaving no room at all for rational thought. “No objections.”

Fifteen minutes later, Eddie is sitting on his bed with his underwear around his knees, a picture of Richie’s come-splattered stomach open on his phone, his own come soaking into the balled-up t-shirt clutched in his left hand. He feels like he has whiplash in the best possible way. Richie is murmuring to him on speakerphone and suddenly the echo of it in the hotel room feels far too remote and impersonal. Grimacing as he wipes his other hand on the ruined shirt, Eddie picks up the phone and thumbs it off speakerphone, pressing it close to his ear to hear the way Richie is breathing ragged and hard.

“Fuckin’ shit, Eds,” Richie chuckles, sounding warm and loose in a way that sends shivers up and down Eddie’s spine. “Never knew you had it in you. Kinda wish I'd had it in me,” he adds, ruefully.

It’s said so innocently that Eddie really can’t help it. He laughs so hard he nearly chokes, while Richie squawks with false indignation and tells him he has a filthy mind.

“I really fucking love you,” Eddie says, meaning every syllable, feeling jigsaw pieces clicking into places. Or, recognising that the pieces fell into place sometime between the Jade of the Orient and discharging himself from Eastern Maine to make Ben drive him back to the Town House. It makes him panicky, but the importance of articulating this to Richie trumps his own anxiety.

“You too,” Richie says, smile audible in his voice. “Go to bed, asshole, one of us needs to hold down an actual job.”

“Actually, uh - I meant to tell you - I quit. Tendered my resignation a couple of days ago. Thought I’d give that driving thing a go - means I can set up anywhere, I'm less tied to the East Coast.”

For a long moment, Richie says nothing. Eddie fiddles nervously with the damp hem of his shirt. He detests not being able to see Richie’s face, which has always been so open for his interpretation.

“That sounds great,” Richie says, in the end, sounding like he’s smiling, and Eddie smiles too, giving himself permission to revel in a rare feeling of bone-deep satisfaction.


	8. Chapter 8

Richie’s been complaining that the last show of the tour - a last minute addition, swung by Richie’s manager in an attempt to recoup the losses incurred by the mid-tour cancellations - has been scheduled purely to punish him. He’s accused Brandon of being a spiteful, petty little man with a life so empty his only joy comes from watching Richie suffer. 

Eddie’s pointed out how ridiculous this is, because Brandon might well have vowed vengeance on Richie for running off to New England, but he’s pulled serious strings to get him this extra gig, and it’s not his fault Richie’s shitting bricks about returning to his hometown for the first time in twenty-two years. 

“It’s not my hometown,” Richie mutters darkly, for the fifteenth time since he called Eddie to let him know he wouldn’t be back in LA for an additional three days at the end of the tour. 

“For fuck’s sake, it’s not Brandon’s fault he doesn’t fucking know that.”

“And how many people know you’re not Portland born-and-bred, huh?” Richie demands.

“That’s not the fucking point!”

“It’s exactly the point. When that treacherous fucking homunculus started talking about a homecoming show, I thought he was fucking joking, so I told him I lost my virginity under the bleachers at Burlington High; excuse me if I neglected to mention the fact I only moved there after my friends and I nearly got eaten by a homophobic clown, which I subsequently forgot, and that my entire one-and-a-half-year residency in the state of Vermont was spent miserably in the closet, counting the hours until I could get the fuck outta there.”

“I don’t think that makes you exceptional, asshole; show me one kid that doesn’t want to get out of their hometown.”

“It’s not my hometown, Eds,” Richie whines. “I won’t give a shit that I’m back in that shitty place. I don’t know why Brandon expects anybody else to care."

It turns out Richie is precisely wrong, because the show sells out in under two weeks. It helps, Richie complains, that the venue’s half the capacity of the theatres he’s used to playing. It also helps, Eddie knows, having carried out a little reconnaissance on Richie’s fan page on Facebook, that even people who claim to like Richie’s comedy are convinced he’s going to lose it on stage again before the tour’s over, and seem to want a front-row seat when he does.

The thing is, the past two weeks have been kinda busy for Eddie, too. He thinks he’s finally found an apartment he can afford that offers him the possibility of a short-term lease, and he’s been calling in some favours from work contacts to get an idea of whether or not the driving thing might be a viable business. Yesterday, he took receipt of a large brown envelope containing Myra’s divorce papers; his lawyer says it’s the fastest divorce he’s ever had the misfortune to litigate, because Bob’s persuaded Myra to claim adultery and pursue an extortionate rate of alimony and Eddie, against all advice, is contesting none of it. Eddie finds he doesn’t much care, as long as there’s something, somewhere he can sign. 

Every time he and Richie have been able to speak in the meantime, Eddie’s tried to talk him down from his determination that the Burlington show is a foregone disaster. Every time, Richie distracts him with filthy suggestions and the sound of his hand moving wetly on his own flesh and every time, Eddie succumbs to it. It’s not that he's ungrateful; he hasn’t ever gotten off with such regularity, between an adolescence spent terrified of his own desires and a marriage he’s starting to be able to recognise as having been dysfunctional in a vast number of ways. But there’s the tell-tale way Richie gets shifty and awkward when Eddie brings up Richie’s idea of trying out some new material to replace the most misogynist parts of his act, and the fact he changes the subject whenever Eddie makes an allusion to his going back to the West Coast. And the thing is… the thing is, Eddie absolutely cannot deal with what happens if it turns out he’s right, and all this is a symptom of Richie getting cold feet.

Which is why, on the night of the final show, Eddie lets Richie call him from his dressing room and talk both of them into coming in their pants, wishes him luck, and then busies himself with putting together the finances for his application for a business loan so he won’t spend the evening staring at the clock and waiting for Richie’s set to be over. He absolutely refuses to spend another night anticipating Richie coming off stage, signing a few autographs, having drinks with the crew, retiring to his hotel room to call Eddie and muttering hot, filthy promises down the line, when Eddie suspects he doesn’t mean them. At least, not in the way Eddie means them, rearranging his whole life around the idea of moving into Richie’s horrible, vulgar condo when Richie has carefully, but oh-so-fucking-obviously avoiding making Eddie any offer of the kind.

When his phone vibrates, he’s been staring at spreadsheets for so long he feels like his eyes have stapled themselves to the back of his skull.

“Eddie Kaspbrak,” he answers, absent-mindedly, without checking the caller ID.

“Ben Hanscomb,” Ben replies, amused. “I thought we might have been on first-name terms by now.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you too, man. What’s up?”

“Have you heard from Richie?”

“Not since this afternoon. Why?”

"Has Bill called you?” 

Eddie rolls his eyes and abandons the pretence of making headway with the data. He pushes his chair back from the hotel desk that’s three inches too low and stretches, feeling every one of his vertebrae pop. 

“No, why would - wait - for fuck’s sake, hold on - “ Eddie switches to the second incoming call. “Bill? What the fuck is going on? Why have I got you and Hanscomb tag-teaming me? Has something happened?”

Suddenly he’s envisaging a range of terrible possibilities. An accident on Richie’s way to the gig, a car wreck, some fucking lunatic with a knife, red balloons and that hideous fucking giggle, teeth and legs and a broken arm. “Bill, what’s happened?”

“Nothing, Eddie, I swear; I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

The hair on the back of his neck is standing on end. The leper has followed him into his dreams twice already this week, and if it puts him on edge, and if he hasn’t mentioned it to anyone, it’s because he’s sick and fucking tired of constantly being so afraid. He knows what voice Mike will use, if he tells him about the way he keeps thinking he catches sight of a lurching figure disappearing around corners just ahead of him on the street. He knows Bev will want to talk again about therapy, as though there’s a therapist in the world who’d listen to Eddie trying to pick his way through talking about his issues while avoiding mention of clowns and sewers and not declare him crazy.

“Yeah?” He says, scowling at his laptop screen. "Well, you should fucking know better.”

“Eddie, I’m sorry,” Bill says, and Eddie scoffs because he doesn’t sound sorry enough. “Jeez, I am! Listen, have you checked Twitter?"

Eddie thinks this might just be the crowning moment of a perfect, shitty day. 

“The fuck do you mean, ‘have I checked Twitter’? No, Bill. Just because the two of us supposedly “work" from home, now, doesn’t mean we both just sit on our asses all day spewing a couple hundred words of purple prose. I have actual work to do - no, I have not checked fucking Twitter."

“So good to talk to you, as always, Eddie,” Bill says drily. “Check Richie’s Twitter.”

Eddie switches back to the call from Ben. “You want me to check Twitter too, huh?”

“Yeah, there’s a video on Richie’s timeline, some guy in the audience posted it tonight.”

“What?” Eddie says, squinting at his laptop screen and wheeling himself close enough to start typing. “What am I looking for?”

“Oh, you’ll know,” says Ben, smugly. At least, it sounds really fucking smug to Eddie, and he tells Ben so. Ben laughs. “Love you too, Eddie. Bev says call her.”

“Tell her to call me herself. Bill,” he says, switching calls, “what the fuck am I looking for?”

“Video from someone at the show. We figured someone should talk to him, and we figured it should be you, but you haven’t been on the WhatsApp.”

“Again, some of us have actual work to do, William.”

“Eddie, it’s 11PM on a Friday, no one has work to do.” Bill’s using his concerned voice, the one that presages a conversation about Eddie’s state of mind, and Eddie is this close to telling Bill to bite him when he manages to pull up Richie’s Twitter page, with its unflattering selfie icon and its garish banner advertising the tour. “You got it?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “I got it. He's retweeted it, can’t be that bad.”

“Yeah, just watch it. And then call him, make sure he’s not face-down in a bottle of tequila.”

“Bill! What the fuck - “

Bill has hung up, and Eddie is staring at a blurry screenshot wondering what the hell he’s about to witness and whether it’s something he can bear, if Richie’s being mocked by these keyboard warrior assholes, laughed at and not with, by some no-name loser from Burlington.

Richie’s already onstage when the video starts, that much is obvious, and he hasn’t been for long, because he’s detaching the microphone and settling into the personable slouch he affects when he’s about to start his set. He wasn’t wrong about the size of the venue, Eddie reflects; the guy with the camera’s stage-left, near the back, it looks like the kind of club Richie hasn’t played for years, and Eddie’s starting to regret his decision to watch this when he realises Richie has a look on his face of absolute beatific determination. It’s the face he wore, once, when he instructed his friends to help him go kill a fucking clown. Eddie sits up straighter in his uncomfortable chair and leans forward to catch what Richie’s saying.

“So, it turns out I got you all here under false pretences,” Richie says, "because Burlington isn’t actually my hometown.”

There’s an indistinct heckle from the far side of the audience and Richie smirks in its direction. Eddie hates that he finds it all so pathetically attractive, from Richie's oversized, hideous shirt to the way he’s roasting a guy for wearing a Black Bears sweater in a Catamounts town, as though Richie knows the first fucking thing about varsity basketball.

“Anyway, as I was saying, this is not my hometown. Sure, I was at school here for a few years, ate my share of dust outside the gym hall at Burlington High.” He pauses for a couple of whoops from the crowd. "But I was born and raised in a much smaller town somewhere North of here - you’ll forgive me if I’m loose on the specifics, these small towns can get awful protective of their reputation. So I hope the small-minded, ignorant, inbred assholes of my real hometown believe me when I say I have nothing to my name worth suing for but my Pornhub subscription. Anyway, you know how small towns are. In our small town, as far as I knew there were only two ways to be gay: scared, or dead. You just know,” Richie continues, after a pause, “that someone in the ass-end of Maine’s already rethinking making a claim on that Pornhub subscription.”

There’s laughter, and someone hollers from the back, and Richie’s face cracks open into a smile more real than any Eddie’s seen him wear on the genuinely awful Netflix show he sat through. 

Eddie watches, open mouthed, one hand gripping the edge of the miniature desk, as over the next forty-five minutes Richie spins the audience a number of tales about their childhood. He tells them about his bunch of misfit friends, and how they all carried around their trauma from living in a town where nobody gave a shit about them, least of all their own parents. He talks about the reunion when they found out their best friend was dead, about the Kissing Bridge, and the way Richie’s still hung up about what happened to Stan, because he knows what it’s like to be so scared it seems like there’s only one way out. There are gasps and nervous laughter as Richie relates an anecdote about trying to have sex with a guy who’s wearing a plaster cast and has a phobia of bodily fluids. Eddie’s heart is in his mouth, and his knuckles are white on the edge of the table, and he’s never been so proud of Richie or so terrified for him in the entire thirty-two years of their acquiantance. 

It’s a short set, and Richie apologises as he closes, for the new material and the fact no one in the audience got the career-ending breakdown they were waiting for.

“So, long story short,” he says, grinning, rueful and slightly overwhelmed, “taking on board the advice of literally everyone who knows me, I’m going to go away for a while and work on my act. You’ve been great, Burlington, thank you and goodnight!”

The video cuts out and Eddie finds himself leaning in, furious, wanting to see those fuckers on their feet, wanting to see them giving Richie the respect they owe him for standing in front of them and being totally fucking honest, which is more than Eddie has managed in public at any point in the past forty years of his existence. There are tears dripping off his chin.

He realises, to his horror, while he’s wiping snot and tears off himself, that Richie has been attempting to call him for the past ten minutes. He grabs at his phone, gets it to his ear, and hears Richie somewhat drunkenly saying his name.

“Bill told me to call you,” Eddie says, stupidly, because he’s sure Richie will be able to tell he’s covered in his own mucus.

“Well, you did great with that one, Eds. Top marks, all round.”

“Fuck you, man. I’m supposed to be checking you’re not floating in tequila. I just saw the video.”

Eddie swears he can hear Richie shrug expansively. He can picture expensive minibar spirits being sloshed haphazardly onto hotel room carpet. “There’s always an asshole with an iPhone. Guess that’s what you get for sharing your deepest, darkest secrets with five hundred people who low-key think you’re a douche.”

“Not even low-key,” Eddie says, because apparently he can’t help himself, “have you read the comments? _Don’t_ read the comments,” he adds, because Richie is his own worst enemy and will skip straight past the praise and the grudging admiration in search of the one guy throwing around slurs, and he’ll fixate on it, and Eddie can’t bear to think of him, slumped in his hotel room wearing a bathrobe and giving brain space to the outpourings of a few homophobic morons. "So, um. Anyway, that was a surprise.”

“Yeah, I, uh. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Brandon nearly had a stroke when I told him I was gonna throw in some new material. I may have allowed him to think it was just gonna be a couple of riffs on my newfound identity not, you know, a ground-up re-write. I think he blew an artery five minutes in, he’s probably still lying there, dead backstage.”

“I mean, why would you bother informing him, or anyone, beforehand,” Eddie said. “It’s only the most momentous decision of your career, I can’t imagine why anybody might be hurt that you didn’t mention it going in."

“Eds,” Richie says, and Eddie feels most of the righteous anger he’s been working on slip through his fingers like sand. “Can we skip to the bit where you tell me you’re proud of me, and I embarrass us both by crying at you on FaceTime?"

“I am fucking proud of you,” Eddie says, crossly. “How are you doing, underneath the tequila?"

“It’s champagne, baby; someone ordered a bottle. Can you stop being so fucking careful? I’m not about to have that fucking breakdown.”

“Well, fuck you too. I meant, how does it feel? Is it different, now you’ve told everyone?”

There’s a pause. Eddie wonders how long Richie’s been in his hotel room drinking alone, whether the party ended early, or if he’s stumbled back there just to talk to Eddie.

“I don’t know,” Richie says, and he sounds so fucking lost suddenly, like he can’t remember how he ended up there, either. “I don’t know how it’s supposed to feel. I don’t fucking regret it,” he adds, preempting Eddie’s next tentative question.

"I guess we both get to choose what happens now, then,” he says instead. “I signed the papers this morning. Myra’s papers.”

“Yeah?” Richie says, and he sounds so far away, like Eddie's talking to him down one of those cup-and-string telephones they used to make in grade school. “Good for you, Eds.”

“‘Good for me’? What’s that supposed to fucking mean?”

“It means good for you! It means you can live your life now, whichever way you want it. Move to Malibu, get a beach house and a pool boy. Personally, I intend to return to LA and bask in the reflected glory of being the internet’s new gay best friend for at least the next two weeks.”

“Oh, is that your plan?”

“Look, Eddie,” Richie says, his voice suspended between sincerity and awful drunken bravado, “I’m just saying. You’re free now. You don’t need to pin your dreams on the first fucking desperate closet-case that came your way."

“You’re such a fucking dick, sometimes,” Eddie says, after an ugly silence, and hangs up.

He stares at his phone for a long time, wondering how exactly the conversation could have managed to go so badly wrong, with him saying none of the right things and Richie drunk in Vermont and not asking Eddie to move to LA.

He considers the minibar. He considers getting wrecked on tiny, expensive whiskey and ringing Bill in the morning to commiserate about the fact that Richie’s cut him loose and had the audacity to try and make it sound like he was doing Eddie a favour. He thinks about digging around in his toiletries bag for the little case of Ambien, but it always lends him lucid, vividly memorable dreams, and he’s not desperate enough to risk inviting those kind of nightmares, after everything that’s happened. In the end he does fifty angry crunches and then lies awake listening to airplanes take off and land, until midnight, when the planes stop and he’s left with the hum of the AC and, beyond that, a whole lot of silence.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, and for your feedback - means the world ❤️
> 
> I've also just posted a standalone Reddie Soulmate AU, if you're in the market for further heartbreak.

He doesn’t text, he doesn’t call. It’s like cutting off a limb. Neither does Richie, and that’s what really gets to Eddie; Richie, whose stupid texts and pictures of Ted Cruz as the Zodiac Killer have kept him sane these past few weeks, is suddenly incommunicado. Eddie tells himself he isn’t going to be the one to cave, because if he calls he’ll fold like a shitty hand in poker, and he needs Richie to acknowledge that what he said was bullshit. He needs Richie to be on the same page with this. He can’t handle Richie dismissing the reason he’s divorcing Myra and putting his whole fucking life on the line, making it a joke, as though Eddie's genuinely considering flying down to Malibu and partying with cabana boys. As though that gives Richie an easy way out, a way of pretending it was Eddie and not him who changed his mind.

In the end, the silence from Richie is something he tries to use to his advantage. It gives him the space to attempt to get his head together again, to sign the lease on the new apartment even though he hates that he isn’t getting on a plane instead. The apartment’s tiny, but it’s furnished, and he can give notice and move out whenever he likes. The insecurity of it, the fact he’ll almost certainly need to move again in a few months, is the sort of thing that would have caused the old Eddie Kaspbrak to need to spend the afternoon breathing into a paper bag with his pharmacist on speed-dial. The new Eddie Kaspbrak tries really hard not to think about it, and when that doesn’t work he moves his cases from the trunk of his car and spends an afternoon ironing and hanging all his shirts. 

He posts a selfie with his new keys on the WhatsApp group, then the address when Bev insists they need to know where to send the congratulations cards. He gives Mike and Bill a video tour over FaceTime, apologising for the fact he hasn’t cleaned, carefully not mentioning the fact that Mike appears to have taken quite the detour from his roadtrip to Florida and that Bill isn’t wearing his wedding ring. 

If it turns out he’s only one quarter of the people he knows who’ve turned out to be queer and he spent all those years feeling so fucking scared and alone for no reason, he’ll be really fucking angry. He knows it’s irrational; he knows it’s unfair to Bill and Mike, because it’s none of his fucking business, and he should know better than anyone that no one’s under any obligation to put labels on themselves if they don’t want to. Still, it makes him feel like people have been keeping secrets from him, which makes him really fucking anxious, but his new therapist says he needs to start working through some serious issues regarding boundaries, and this feels like as good a place to start as any. 

Bev's so fucking proud of him when he tells her he’s started seeing someone privately. He rang her one night in utter, blank-eyed desperation when every time he closed his eyes he saw bandaged hands reaching for him out of the emptiness of his darkened bedroom, and she murmured about trauma and how she’s been seeing someone about PTSD and the fact she can’t lock the bathroom door behind her, even in public restrooms, without needing to throw up. 

A week later, the bank meeting about the start-up loan goes better than Eddie had anticipated. Turns out his “mildly frightening manic energy” (Bev) coupled with his “unnecessarily detailed calculations” (Bill) led the loans manager to conclude that Eddie is exactly the kind of guy he's willing to trust with the bank’s money. “If anyone’s going to make that business work, it’s Eddie,” agrees Ben, and Eddie always knew he should have been Eddie’s favourite. 

It’s only later that afternoon, while he’s browsing domain names and wondering how much it’ll cost to hire a web designer who can make ’Northstar Driving Services’ seem like a company that wasn’t started by a middle-aged divorcé who doesn’t even own the furniture he’s sitting on, that he wonders whether the curse has lifted, after all. For Ben and Bev, for Bill and Mike, he really fucking hopes he’s wrong, because God knows they all deserve some happiness, but there’s a voice whispering to him that it can’t really see what’s changed, for Eddie, between low-key misery with Myra and this equally miserable kind of loneliness. He wonders, maybe, if losing Richie all over again is the price he’s paid to the universe for wrenching himself free of Myra and staking claim to his autonomy. 

All of which makes it very surprising when he gets back from a late session at his complex’s tiny gym to find Richie sitting on the edge of the planter full of tree ferns by his front door, rumpled and unshaven and looking like he’s extremely hungover. There’s an overnight bag at his feet, the same one he dragged to Derry and back, and he’s wearing what Eddie is fairly sure is at least a two-day-old shirt. His head’s bowed and his fingers are steepled together, thumbs pressing deeply into the skin either side of the bridge of his nose. When he hears Eddie’s approach and glances up at him, there’s some kind of expression of relief and horror mingling on his face and it makes him look like he’s weighing up spewing on Eddie’s sneakers. He looks like seven different kinds of shit.

“What are you doing here?” Eddie demands, once he’s taken all of this in.

“I’m great, thanks for asking,” Richie says, deadpan, eyes not leaving Eddie’s face. “The flight was amazing, the traffic was phenomenal. How are you, Eddie?”

Eddie scoffs and marches past him, shoving the key into the lock with unnecessary force. He refuses to invite Richie inside, but Richie follows anyway, dragging the overnight bag with him and closing the door behind them, as though he has any right, any right at all to be there, taking up space in this place that is Eddie’s, and Eddie’s alone; Eddie leaves him there in order to hang up his gym bag and when he returns Richie is standing in the middle of the living room-diner, looking around with his hands spread in a gesture of mocking appreciation. He whistles. 

“Some place you got here, Eds.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie snaps. “Fuck you, Richie. This place is perfect - it’s got everything I need, it’s five minutes from the subway, and it has a gym and a view, and - fuck you, you asshole, are you laughing at me?"

Richie’s staring out of the window, where between buildings a very distant sliver of the Manhattan Bridge is arguably visible. “Yes, I'm laughing at you. This place is an actual bad joke.”

“Well, I’m fucking sorry we can’t all live in LA and jerk off to the view of the Hollywood sign through our floor-to-ceiling windows.”

“Well, it’s not like the offer wasn’t there."

“Are you fucking kidding me? Are you actually trying to claim that it’s my fault we’re not on the opposite side of the country, right now? Are you actually trying to claim that this is my fault? I thought we said I was coming back to LA, at some point. I thought - I thought after I’d calmed down, after you’d apologised, we’d talk."

“I don’t think we ever had that conversation. I was under the distinct impression that the West Coast life wasn’t for you, Mr ’The air in Los Angeles tastes like the inside of a catalytic convertor'."

“Well, I’m not wrong, everything in California is fucking awful. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t move there in a minute, if you'd fucking asked me.”

“Eddie, you got a fucking apartment.” Richie scrubs his hand through his hair, making it stand up on end.

“You told me to get a fucking pool boy! I told you I’d signed the papers, and your immediate response was to tell me to get a house in Malibu and go fuck a pool boy!"

For a long moment, Eddie thinks somehow Richie hasn’t heard him. His back’s still turned like he’s fascinated by that distant slice of the Manhattan Bridge. Then, to Eddie’s horror, Richie’s shoulders slump and he seems to fold in on himself in a way that makes it looks like he’s a punctured balloon. He sits heavily onto the arm of the couch and puts one hand over his eyes, as if suddenly the Manhattan Bridge offends him, after all.

“Richie?” Eddie says, concerned despite himself.

Richie holds up his other hand as though to fend Eddie off. “Eds,” he says, sounding quiet and defeated. “I’m fucking everything up."

Eddie doesn’t bother denying it. “Is this some fucking bullshit,” he says, instead, “about you somehow thinking I don’t really love you? Or that my life would somehow have been better without all of this? That fucking bullshit you told Bev about me figuring out if it was worth coming back?”

Richie gives an unhappy snort, “Fuck Bev. She can’t keep a fucking secret.”

Eddie reaches for him, because it’s all he’s been wanting to do in the intervening weeks since he closed Richie’s front door behind him on his way to LAX. He curls his hand around the back of Richie’s neck, where the hair’s too long and beginning to curl, like the time it grew out of the stupid bowl-cut Richie’s mom gave him when they were in sixth grade. Richie’s bowed head rests heavily against Eddie’s sweaty shoulder.

“Rich, why the fuck are you here?”

Richie laughs mirthlessly and drags a hand over his face. “My ass is literally your property, where else am I supposed to go?”

Eddie sighs. It’s been a long day, and his shirt is sticking to his back with cooled sweat, and Richie must be able to smell it on him, not that Richie appears to mind. 

“I need a shower,” he mutters. “Don’t fucking follow me.”

Richie lets him go, watches as he retreats into the bathroom and shuts the door behind him. He’s grateful to be able to put a solid surface between them, because any time now he’s going to start hyperventilating and he doesn’t want Richie to see; he wants Richie to be gone when he opens the door, but also that’s the last thing he wants, and he has to sit on the toilet for a solid minute and count four slow breaths in and six slow breaths out, until his heart has stopped pounding in his ears.

He wrenches the bathroom door open and finds Richie hovering on the other side of it, clearly dismayed to be found in contravention of Eddie’s instructions. 

“I wasn’t gonna come in,” he says defensively, eyes flicking downwards to glance at Eddie’s chest through his damp shirt. 

"What the fuck have you done with your place?” Eddie demands. 

Richie shrugs. “I’ll rent it out, I guess. I hate that soulless hipster shoebox.”

“No, you fucking don’t. You love that shitty apartment. What the fuck have you done with all your cacti?”

“They’re succulents, dickwad. I gave them to a neighbour. I mean, I left them by her door, she can use them as butt-plugs, if that’s what makes her happy. Figured I can get houseplants wherever.” This is said with another shrug belied by Richie’s damp eyes, ringed with pink and bloodshot, like he hasn’t slept in a week.

“You bring those shitty hanging macrame plant holders into any house of mine and they’ll be going so far up your ass -“

“Eddie, baby, I thought you’d never offer -“

“Fuck off, Richie.”

“Do you have to be so fucking hostile? They purify the air. They filter toxins or some shit.”

“Richie,” Eddie says, curling his fingers on the shoulders of Richie’s jacket. “I don’t give a shit about your houseplants.”

His hands are tugging on Richie’s ugly shirt, and then Richie’s looming over him, arms around his shoulders, crowding him against the open bathroom door. He kisses like he’s been starving for it, pressing one knee between Eddie’s thighs and letting Eddie’s fingers claw at him ineffectually. Eddie settles for hauling him closer until Richie’s rutting against his stomach and pulling his hair and gasping in his ear, and Eddie is sweaty and furious and so fucking turned on. 

“Holy shit,” Richie mutters when he finally gets a hand round Eddie’s dick, breathing airplane coffee all over him. “I fucking missed you."

Eddie kisses him, because any words that fall out of his mouth are going to betray him, and he isn’t done being angry yet, not by a long shot. He scrabbles for Richie’s fly, shoves his jeans off his bony hips, and Richie bucks into his grasp, sagging against him like it’s too much effort to hold himself upright anymore. 

Richie’s stooped over him and Eddie’s arching up to meet him and if questioned he would never, ever admit how much it does it for him, this height thing, the way Richie can manhandle him whichever way he wants to. Richie's jacking them off with one arm braced against the door by Eddie’s head and the other hand wrapped around the both of them, his tongue hot and dirty in Eddie’s mouth. It’s all he’s ever fucking wanted, and it’s this thought that has him arching off the door and shooting his load all over Richie’s dorky shirt. Richie makes a noise like he’s choking and presses him back, holding him down while he surges against him, rubbing himself off on Eddie’s belly and then keeping him there while he trembles his way through it. Eddie’s breathing hard, his arms loose around Richie’s waist, and Richie’s panting into his shoulder, his eyes screwed shut as though he’s worried Eddie might disappear.

Eddie kisses him, then, because he can, because it’s the first time he’s doing it properly since he signed Myra’s papers, and because Richie’s day-old aftershave smells like those seventy-two perfect hours they spent holed up in California.

“This is literally all I’ve ever wanted,” he says, making Richie meet his eye. “If you ever repeat this to anyone, I will kill you. But this - you, me, this - this is it."

For a moment, Eddie is concerned Richie might cry, because his eyes are damp and his mouth’s twisted up unhappily, but then he smiles, and Eddie knows what’s coming, even before he says it, and is already rolling his eyes in anticipation.

“This is it? Thirty seconds of heaven against a bathroom door? Eddie, you’re a cheap date.”

“Fuck you, thirty seconds. You’re ruining the moment, jackass.” 

Richie falls silent and Eddie kisses him again. He thinks he might be drunk with the power of being able to do this whenever he chooses, hopes Richie realises what he’s in for, that Eddie thinks he might enjoy making himself a tyrant.

“I love you so fucking much,” Richie says, looking vaguely embarrassed by the tightness in his voice and the fact he’s half-dressed in Eddie’s bathroom doorway. “I’m sorry it took me all this fucking time.”

“You will owe me,” Eddie says, seriously. “But I’m not fucking kidding, all I ever wanted. If you could stop getting in your own way and let me blow you in the shower, now, that’d be great, because you stink like airplane and sadness and you’re making me feel pathetic by osmosis, just being this close to you."

Richie laughs in his hair and Eddie hates it. He’s sweaty and sticky and he’s pretty sure Richie’s wiping his nose on the shoulder of his damp gym shirt. Eddie hates it; he fucking loves it, too.


End file.
